HTB Chronicills - Tales of the Bum

The prehensile-story babble shit

It’s a snowy winter day, then night, and about half way into the next morning in a small, smoky cabin owned by someone completely unaware of the occupants within. That's another long story I would have to fabricate, and we don't have time to get into that right now. Just trust me on this one. I'm a narrator, so I know what I'm talking about. Now, like I was saying, in this smoky cabin an old shriveled up man who might not be all that old but is still really haggard looking. Ya know? He's sitting next to a roaring fire which happens to be in the kitchen sink. Don't worry about that. It's not relevant to our story and they do this sort of shit all the time. It's no big deal, usually. The oldish man is telling a young, inquisitive boy who is otherwise bored out of his mind "slightly" embellished stories of his youth… (Okay, I'm done. Roll the film)

The real story babble shit

"Sit down boy and I will tell you tales of the Great Harold the Bum... the Great Bum Harold", the old man announced to the already seated boy before lapsing into silence. The elder man weighed which title sounded better before losing his train wreck of thought. Rather than admit the matter, he waited for a clue from the boy or supper, whichever came first.

"Harold the bum? What's a bum, sir?", the conveniently impressionable boy asked beaming up at the old man.

Startled back to reality and the topic Harold's fuse began to glow a dark red, "Shut the fuck up kid and I'll tell ya! You little brats are always so quick to yap, yap, yap all the time that you've got no stuff of the stuff. I've tried to dump and cover everything I know in you, but still you don't know when to shut the fuck up. Which is right about... wait for it... now."

The boy was used to the old man's outbursts. Secretly, he found them amusing. He knew the gnarled old man loved him, and would never hurt him, but it was fun to get him to the boiling point and watch the old man fumble and make up words to "tessellate his consterfrunations". Yup, fun.

Harold continued, "Now, earlier you inquired about the nature of a bum. You see, punk ass little one, being a bum is a lot like being a powerful wizard... a great and powerful wizard", lied the old man with the repose of a venerated, but over-medicated elder.

"Wow! Really? How is being a bum like being a wizard, sir?", the boy interjected excitedly.

"Kid, if you interrupt me one more time I'll slap you in the head so hard you'll never have children of your own to abuse. Now, you sit there like a three day old tuna fish sandwich crust and... remain...

The old man had popped a breaker again. This happened from time to time. Harold's eyes remained open and fixed on some unseen object far outside the cabin walls. The unblinking gaze that war veterans called the 10,000 yard stare. Harold's eyes flicked towards the boy and then back to the stare. Oh, this required the boy's input, "Are you okay?" the youth cautiously added a few drops of sympathetic fuel like leaded gasoline on wet charcoal to get things rolling again.

Harold roared back to subsistence. "I'm having a hard enough time remembering these stories due to all the amazing stuff I did in my puff and stumble youth. It wasn't easy walking around with more chemicals in me than most suburban lawns. So, I didn't do much walking. Come to think of it, I didn't do much of anything that I can recall. I didn't do it! I didn't... Alright, I'll take the plea agreement."

Looking a bit out of sorts from all these self-inflicted interruptions... Harold strained one of those looks like there was a piece of glass in his passing turd. Suddenly, but more slowly, came an expression of relief but the pain managed to cattle prod both remaining brain cells up to an idle  stupor. The intellectual stirring was like push starting an ill-maintained, manual transmission 1972 Dodge Dart with shitty upholstery and one helluva mildew problem. A properly timed grinding pop of the clutch later, Harold jerked and shuttered on.

"Now, where was I? Oh yes, now imagine you wake up every morning with literally nothing. Perhaps, you have one shoe, a pair of pants though you can't remember where, but you're still wearing the rainbow suspenders wrapped around your arm. That's it. Starting with nothing and a feeling like someone replaced your spleen with a voracious flesh eating dragon, you need to get a $40 sack of heroin before the dragon devours you. That gives you about 39 minutes or less. So, you're starting with nothing and turning it into something worth forty bucks. Sometimes twice a day. That's magic, and magic is what wizards do."

"But, sir, don't you mean he would virtually start with nothing, rather than literally start with nothing?" the boy offered as a clarifying detail.

Harold's adventure story slammed to a halt like another one of those damned Kardashian marriages. 

"What the hell are you talking about, boy? I can't understand more than half of the mouth words yer spewing at me. The majority of them. You're incomprecutable."

The boy let the last sentence go and pursued his original objective, "I was merely pointing out that literally means it is exactly the way stated in its state of being, not figurative. The bum you referred to did, in fact, have things that you mentioned... one shoe, a pair of pants though he couldn't remember where, and a pair of rainbow suspenders. Ergo, therefore, he wasn't literally starting with nothing."

Harold stared slack jawed at the kid, then remembering that the best defense is an ad hominem offense, he made haste to launch the assault,

"Is that the kind of asinine babble they teach you youngsters in school these days? Shit! My ex-wife had more sense than that. All she understood was the damn Wheel of Fortune, scratch tickets, and to stop asking me to bathe!"

The tyke properly subdued and appearing seriously contrite (wink), Harold cast a hard stare through an uncomfortable silence for some time. Making sure his point was taken, Harold tossed another tight wad of bearer bonds into the kitchen sink fire in order to illuminate his glowing disatismentation.

"Oh, sure, Harold had something and I'm not just talking about Hep C, either. He became a legend among the folks in the Valley, an infamous, impertinent legend. There were epic poems and many sagas written about his exploits by at least one semi-literate scribbler of those days. Not only had Harold managed to work his magic for many years, he had also survived more overdoses than Keith Richards and Ozzie combined, and Harold's arrest record was the first in all King County to be indexed into a three volume set with a special gold leaf collector's edition for the psychiatrictichian business... Now that's crazy, huh?"
The boy made the mistake of taking Harold inquiry as anything but rhetorical, "So, where can I find copies of these epic poems and sagas?"

"Uh, they're around in some places." Harold hated when people focused on the minor embellishments woven into story for dramatic effect rather than the true artisticness of the work. They were missing the whole thing of the thing, as Harold called it. Whatever it was that he was talking about... What the fuck was I...

Harold looked at the boy and asked, "Why don't you go buy me a pack of cigarettes, and as a reward you can go play with some of them dead squirrels we fed the bread crumbs dipped in antifreeze to the other day?"

"You did that! I didn't even know what it was! You said it was green gravy." the boy recoiled in trauma of that morning when he woke to find the freshly fallen snow littered with freshly fallen, stiffening squirrels.

"Eh, kid, you can't delegate culpabilitation, but I'll let you off with a plea bargain, and I do mean bargain. Now, waddaya say you loan me... mmm... bout seventy-five bucks and go get me a pack of smokes?"

The boy looked sheepishly, then offered, "because I'm only ten years old."

"Fine, fine", Harold allowed, "Then, just lend me the cash and I'll save me the worry of paying you back since I'm doing all the damn work."

The child knew that it was best to just do as the wrinkled one asked, otherwise he'd be forced to listen to more senseless, meandering, and profoundly disturbing tales of the bum.

He smashed his piggy bank and cut his losses.