It’s all fun and games until someone wakes up barely on the sunny side of sixty with two divorces, two bankruptcies, three false teeth, one crown and a family curse that has its teeth so far into someone’s ass cheeks that by the third grade someone developed a facial tic like Humphrey Bogart.
Continuing with lifetime inventory, one musn’t forget two kids not biologically related to that someone; all topped off by an anemic checking account financing mice and other vermin hell bent on roaming across the splintery bedroom floor of an underpriced rent stabilized apartment my landlord clearly wanted me out of by refusing to repair a mold infested wall under my kitchen-area sink.
The wood had been turning brown and green and they had sprinkled baking soda over it. Finally, I had bought electrical tape and hermetically sealed it.
My life had always been like this. My father referred to it as, “The Lipschitz Curse.”
He explained it when I was five. After my cheating whore mother had kicked him out and divorced him, he had moved into a roach infested hippy pad with splinters a constant threat to a little someone.
Dad said a gypsy had gotten real upset back in the 1880’s that my great-grandfather Benny sold him a homosexual stud back in the old country. And thus, the family curse began, or so that’s how my father recounted it.
My paternal grandfather could neither confirm or deny. Grandpa Lipschitz had been in a boating accident in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, when I was just a baby. It seems he wanted to teach my dad to fish for blues but before the boat could undock Grandpa slipped on a banana peel. Grandpa Lipschitz thusly sustained a traumatic head injury so severe that it scrambled his brains with lox and onions, leaving him forever muttering about gefilte fish and my grandma’s shitty cooking until he finally choked to death on a vanilla pudding pop when I was still in high school.
When I was young as spring, I always thought my hippy burnout dad was just making Brooklyn toilets jealous with all this Lipschitz Curse business. But as I moved across the board in the game of Life, I came to the conclusion that this curse business was not apocryphal. I, too, despite having been a high achiever in school began experiencing the curse’s heinous effects in my early 20s.
For starters, the first time I did LSD in college it never wore off. Yeah. I’ve been tripping my balls off since January 12th, 1989. I never told anyone about it and I use special eye drops and thick tinted glasses like Roy Orbison used to wear to conceal this aspect of The Lipschitz Curse. Furthermore, this hit of LSD coincided with the appearance of the then, recently departed character actor, Joe Spinell’s ghost.
“Aren’t you the guy from Rocky?” I asked incredulous as Joe Spinell materialized on the shabby loveseat in my dorm room.
“I done other stuff, too! But never mind that! The cops are coming! You gotta get your revenge on those-“
I was on my feet. Interrupting Joe’s ghost with my jaw on the ground and the fickle finger of fate pointed directly at his pockmarked ethereal but somewhat mischievous face.
“Y-Y-You’re the dude from that, ‘MANIAC’ movie!!!!!” I blurted.
Back in 1980 me and a friend of mine had gone into Times Square, not the Disneyesque version the young whippersnappers are accustomed to today. I’m talking the original version, replete with hustlers, skanks and other assorted denizens of the dirty boulevard.
Well, I came out of that theater on 42nd street, blinking hard into the harsh daylight, wondering just what the fuckin’ fuckity fuck thirteen-year-old I had just witnessed. And it was that data point that hit my tripping brain like a brick pie in the face.
Joe’s ghost checked me out. Then it spoke.
“Two things, kid. One. You’re tripping on some shit that is not of this world. I’m here to tell you. The other things are if you ever want to lose the curse on your head there’s some shit you got to get through.”
Joe’s ghost face was melting.
“Some shit?”
“Yeah. Just like the IRS, hell’s got rules. And just like the IRS you play by those rules or shit usually doesn’t work out too well.”
“You speaking from experience, Joe?” I asked.
Joe melted some more.
“You gots no fuckin’ idea!”
“What’s in it for you?” I asked.
Joe made an expression that was somewhere between a smirk and what might have passed for a chuckle on death row.
“A better room in hell,” he said.
Fast forward to now. I’m the last in the line. My fake brother ODs on someone’s lawn. Hadn’t seen my psychotic knife throwing mother since I was 17. My father was found decomposing on the crapper at 68 clutching a bottle of ex-lax, his eyebrows a permanent, ‘V’.
The mice had just run across my chest. I was on my feet screaming. Landlord wanted to know who would pay for all this. I had lost my job as a consultant after my psychotic manager sabotaged my deployment and convinced his boss it was my fault.
No jobs were in the offing. I had been in and out of work long enough to just keep flirting with insolvency. And to top it all off the woman I was dating explained to me that she wanted to fuck other people and I needed to get on board with that; stat.
Yeah, someone needed a telescope to look up and see a snake’s belly. I was low. Only Boz Scagg’s knew just how much. And Joe.
I hadn’t seen Joe in about 15 years. Last time I saw him was right after my last marriage and business failed and I lost my home just as the great recession came a calling. And here he was again.
“Heyyyyyy. Long time no see, Lipschitz!”
“Joe.” I said drily.
“You gonna offer me coffee or something?”
“Yeah, I got some cannoli and Lavazza.”
Joe sat down at the counter and rubbed a thick hand across his face like he’d been up all century strung out on fame and fortune.
“Look kid. It’s like this. Somebody tipped me off. You got to take a fall.”
“What the fuck you think I been doing the last half-century Joe?!?” I said full of no caffeine, my eyes examining a cohort of mouse shit on the floor by the stove.
“I mean curtains, Lipschitz. Eternal damnation. The whole fuckin’ gabagool, kid.”
“Over a fucking gay horse, Joe?”
I poured two espressos and pushed the sugar at Joe. I pushed the plate of vanilla cannoli at Joe. He took one, sniffed it, then popped it in his mouth. He smiled; it was a sad smile just the same.
“That’s some good cannoli,” he said while chewing. “Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Yeah, over a gay horse.”
“A gay horse in Russia?!? You mean I been abused as a child, survived that and this fuckin’ LSD that just won’t fucking wear off, and I can’t seem to keep my mouth shut whenever I see people getting bullied so I’m always fucking employed just enough to have an hourly panic attack? You mean all this shit and I gotta burn in hell eternally, all because the stud was a dud?!?!?!”
“Hey. I don’t make the rules, Lipschitz. The devil gets his due and you are behind on the vig…”
“Okay. So why tell me? Why come here after fifteen years? By the way, you look like fucking shit, Joe. This is really some fucking bullshit, Joe.”
Joe tilted his chin forward catch the last drop of Lavazza without spilling a drop.
“More espresso?”
Joe held out his cup and I gave him a refill.
“Thanks.”
I nodded.
“So, what now?”
“Well,” Joe began. “I think you go to bed tonight and just don’t wake up. Well, you wake up; just not in your bed.”
“You mean in hell?” I asked tripping harder than usual.
“In hell.”
“And there’s nothing I can do?”
Joe paused a moment and his eyes flicked up and to the left. Then he shook his greasy face almost imperceptibly.
“Not a thing.”
“You looked like you was gonna say something Joe.”
“No, I wasn’t,” he said, his mouth full of a second cannoli.
“Stop hiding the truth,” I said sharply.
Joe seemed taken aback. Joe was a lot of things but in all the years I knew his ghost he was never a liar.
“Well, there might be, but no.”
“Tell me, you fat fuck,” I said meaning business.
“Two for one,” he said.
I waited and looked at him harder. The espresso was good. I was waking up and peaking. I needed to bring this curse to a head.
“Two souls. If it backfires and you get one or none your room in hell will be the worst. We call it the Loser’s Lounge. I’m talking non-stop bad food, only Stalin and Hitler for company and a giant electric dildo that has faulty wiring. It’s too big a risk, kid.
Just take the damnation and in a few millennia, you could be a trustee like me maybe.”
“Two for one?” I repeated.
“Two souls corrupt as sin. And then you win. Fail to pay in full what’s due and feed the flames and vultures for all eternity.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Fuck is right.”
And then Joe was gone and I was alone at my kitchen counter contemplating eternal damnation.
A mouse jumped on the counter.
“Hey kid,” it squeaked.
I eyeballed it. I raised my left eyebrow a bit.
“Kid. I been watching. Remember that collie dog you had when you were six? The one your mother gave away?”
I felt an electric shock hit my brain.
“Carmen?!”
The mouse’s eyes welled up.
“You remembered? After fifty years?”
“You protected me from the…,” I thought of the word. “.. the physicality.”
“Damn straight,” the mouse squeaked. “She was a psycho megabitch. Couldn’t have that could we…,” the mouse asked rhetorically, it’s squeak suddenly sounding like a low growl/snarl.
“Curse got me too kid. I’m a hound of hell. But I been keeping tabs. Joe told me where you were. He really ain’t such a bad guy. He been trying to put his thumb on the scale when he could without being seen.”
I took a deep breath as the mouse suddenly grew full size and moved to the front door of my small dump with a view.
“Trust me kid. Get some rest and don’t worry about all that damnation shit. And don’t worry about those fucks at work. Tomorrow’s another day.”
“Another day to go to hell,” I said.
“Maybe you will,” mouse Carmen said, “… and maybe you won’t.”
And then the front door opened and closed and I was all alone standing there. And suddenly, despite a fourth shot of Lavazza I couldn’t keep my eyes open or my verticality. I stumbled to the mattress on the floor next to the mouse shit and remembered no more.
…
Last Monday
The phone rang. It was Ethan.
“Asher? It’s Ethan.”
Though I was disoriented and full of no coffee and wondering if this was hell I managed to reply, “What the fuck? You fired me for Marco’s psychotic sabotaging bullshit. Why are you calling?”
“Well,” Ethan stammered. “Marco was arrested. He went crazy and his family had to have him committed-“
“What the fuck-“ I blurted.
“We need you back. The app went down when David tried to deploy and-“
“What the fuck happened with Marco?” I heard myself ask.
“All I know is they found him all bloodied with thousands of mice crawling on him and-“
“Mice?!?!”
“Yeah, and it turned out he and his wife weren’t really taking good care of, well, CPS took the kids to their grandparents, and like I said, I don’t know all the details but we need you back. Are you working yet?”
I took a deep breath and noticed something was different. I wasn’t tripping. I wasn’t burning in hell.
“I want double my rate and a contract for five years before I do a fuckin’ thing.”
“I can’t-“ Ethan began and I hung up.
I began counting slowly. On thirteen the phone rang again.
“Don’t hang up. Give me until the afternoon. I will get you a contract. For double.”
“Double for me but make sure you put in an extra 66.6%.”
“What?”
“Ethan, trust me on this. The devil always gets his due.”