HTB Chronicills - The "S" Word

Homeless Sweet Homeless

On one of the many days after Harold went to jail, he found himself feeling remarkably peculiar. The earth no longer squished and swayed under his feet. His limbs did not appear distended and freakish. Nor did he have the urge to gouge out walnut sized pieces of flesh from his face. His urine was light yellow and did not emit the vomitous, acrid odor usually associated with all his normal bodily excretions. This gave Harold reason for great concern. A bum may be many things; reckless, indolent, offensive, obtuse, inebriated, awful, barbaric, beastly, desperate, diabolical, fiendish, flagrant, flatulent, gross, hairy, heinous, lazy, monstrous, nefarious, rotten, scandalous, shocking, villainous, wicked or any combination thereof to name a few. However; one thing a bum is not allowed to be under any acceptable circumstance is sober. In reputable bum circles the world over, the condition of sobriety is so reviled that it is only mentioned as “the S Word”, and the only in hoarse whispers.  

No self-reviling bum would be caught dead sober. It was unthinkable. In bum lore there was the legend of Crackhead Tom who was venerated for choosing to eat the lead paint off his holding cell walls rather than be dishonored by temperance. There beside him in stature was Shardella of Chicago, who drank her own urine during 21 months of incarceration in the hope recycling the meth she carried in her bloodstream when booked. The list goes on, but Harold had no time for paying homage to the patron saints of addiction and miscreants. He was horribly, hostilly, and heretically “the S Word.”

With the precision of a finely tuned machine... well, a finely tuned machine in the throes of a gran mal seizure... Harold maneuvered himself to the floor with his head beneath the stainless steel toilet / sink combo thingy and began to rapidly and rhythmically bash his skull into the bottom of the commode like a frenzied woodpecker adorned in an ill-fitting DOC orange jumpsuit. Somewhere between the 7th and 8th impacts, Harold's' world faded into the thick milky blackness of unconsciousness. The 2 remaining brain cells loitering around in the cavernous hollow of Harold's head were reclining on a broken cotton swab tip and passing the time in idle chat:

Brain Cell #1: Whoa! Did you hear that?  

Brain Cell #2: Hear what?

Brain Cell #1: That deafening banging sound.

Brain Cell #2: Uhmmm... What did it sound like?  

Brain Cell #1: Well, sort of like a deafening banging sound, but maybe a bit louder and definitely more deafening. 

Brain Cell #2: Uhmmm... No, I was busy feeding my mildew collection.  

Meanwhile, back in the corporeal world. Harold was still blacked out, groaning, and had managed to soil himself, as well. 

Several hours later, Harold regained consciousness one faculty at a time. What ancient rabbis defined as "nephesh" and Greek philosophers designated "bio" we would loosely call the "living spirit" of a man was the first of his senses to arrive on the scene. Harold realized he was a sentient entity inhabiting a body of some sort. His sense of touch arrived just in time to note the shredding pain emanating from the orbits of his eyes to his maxilla, and touch dropped from consciousness again. Taste and smell arrived simultaneously, but smell was the first to register the thick stench of offal permeating the holding cell. Taste responded in sympathy, generating a gag reflex. The arrival of sight was significantly more problematic. Harold had reverted to monocular vision. His eyes were no longer able to focus as a single organ. One eye focused to the left at 3 feet distance, whilst the other was preoccupied with an insect above and an 2 inches down field. Nauseating vertigo was the unanimous vote of all Harold's senses, with touch abstaining and remaining in unconsciousness.   

The next sense Harold experienced was the clatter of keys against cold steel, and the familiar voice of a corrections officer grumbling something like, "Harowed yermmum pails yurrowed". Harold was considered fluent with all common and many obscure "gutter tongues"; he parlayed in Wino, Jack Daniel's, Methmouth, Opiod, Barbituan, Xanaxian, and at least a dozen others. However; this mumbling voice was incomprehensible. Summoning every fiber of his being he focused like that Kung Fu dude David Carradine in that Kung Fu show called... Uhm... Ah... Whatever the name was. You know, he always carried his shoes but never wore them, and he did all that crazy "Hiiiiya" shit!... And... What was I talking about?   

Oh yeah, summoning every fiber of being he focused both brain cells on deciphering the sound emanating from the hole in the corrections officers face.  

"Harold, your mom paid bail. You're out."  

Harold remained motionless beneath the stainless steel commode for a moment, his cracked, pallid lips moving with the frailties of an octogenarian croaked,  

" What the fuck was the name of that show?"  

That was the question, the essences of all he had endured, the point of his entire felonious existence came down to this... Fuck! What the fuck was it called! Fuck! Man! 

The corrections officer stared blankly. He had no answers, no parables of revelation, or esoteric intonations of satori. Just a blank stare, nothing. 

Harold pulled himself from the floor taking care to minimize the collateral shit cascade within his jumpsuit. He failed. As he hobbled down the cold cinder block corridor with bed roll in hand he...

Come on! What the fuck was the name of that fucking Kung Fu show? No seriously,  the one with the Kung Fu guy with the shoes, doing all that Kung Fu stuff? Fuck!  

The End

(Now can you tell me? Fuck!) 

The boy never looking away from his X-Box game said, "Kung Fu."

"Yeah, that's the one!", Harold exclaimed, "What was it called? "

The boy shrugged, and pondered how long his father had been having these wild, fantastic fits of fancy. He knew better, his teacher had told him, "There is no such thing as a Harold the Bum."