“Who in hell orders pepperoni pizza for breakfast,” Gordon Stamos said to no one in particular, as he left the diner with the inso-case full of steaming heartburn. Then as he slid into the seat of his perennially unlocked beater—a 1982 Monte Carlo with a gray primer paint job—he mumbled to himself, “And who in hell orders pizza from a goddamned Lithuanian diner who should not be making it to begin with?”

He was headed to the Senior Serenity Center to deliver an item that should be nigh indigestible to retired folk at any time of day, let alone at 9:30 in the morning. As he pulled out into traffic he continued the pointless conversation with his not yet departed ghost. “I suppose you answered that yourself dipshit. Senior Serenity Center is hell for the almost wealthy suburbanite—where they retire to after a life of buying shit they don’t need.”

He then looked critically in the mirror at the emaciated face of the dishwasher/janitor/pizza delivery dipshit who went by the unlikely handle of Gordon Stamos, for no other reason than his dear mother had wasted much more effort imagining her child’s success than had God for instance. Every time Gordon looked into the mirror a chill spread across his body. He was a cat who had spent deeply into his nine lives and had no business still being alive—and did he know it.

“Okay dipshit, the upside is we get a two dollar tip, which gets you twenty percent into your next hit of gloriously smoldering ready rock, nestled in the glowing embers of our Chore-Boy filter, billowing through the toxic lung of the Pepsico gods, into your ravaged tissue—and onward mystic soldier into my fucking brain—yes!”

“Yes, I feel much better already!”

“Indeed, how many forty-five year old crack heads are lucky enough to have a job, however shitty?”

“What is this—would you look at this shit, Mo?”

Up ahead, where the soulless suburban minions of sloth should have been commuting to their various cubicles, in the handful of wannabe skyscrapers in this low rise suburban planning atrocity with a goddamned roundabout known as ‘the Markets at Towncenter,’ just to make it sound like it had a history in the mind’s eye of the land hungry creep that developed what used to be a pristine play area when Gordon was eight, was a mass road rage incident in progress.

Rather than get worried or concerned, Gordon got retrospectively mad. If not for the development of this entire artificial community, and thus the ruination of his childhood playground, Gordon would have never took up smoking in the drainage pipe with Albert and Martin Tingle, would have never taken up shoplifting to support that habit, would have remained a viable hope for high school graduation, would not have snorted that first line n 1981, would not have sucked on that first crack pipe in 1992, and would not be jonesing like a tweaker right now!

His chest was heaving and his hands were gripping the wheel so hard they had turned white. He looked ahead at the traffic jam, that was not just a traffic jam but a full blown hipster riot. “Are you kidding me? I won’t get my tip if I’m late!”

Gordon made a hard right without signaling, up the damned one-way side street that had always pissed him off, and pulled out into traffic, almost getting rear-ended by –a cop car—and banking right.

“Shit dipshit! What now?”

He looked on the floor in front of the passenger seat and saw his homemade Mountain Dew crack bong, the half drunk bottle of Ztckliski vodka, at $2.97 a pint, and saw two weeks in County lockup.

“Shit!” he screamed, and made a hard right into the alley that brought him around behind the theater. He kept the gas on her, knowing the pig would swing around and cut him off, kicked the passenger side door open and began kicking his shit out into the alley as he tore down it about 10 MPH and the door of his vintage wreck sparked off the brick face. The stuff on the floor gone, he weaved a little so the building would slam his door shut, and then—“Oh God the glove box.”

He slammed on the brakes and dug into the glove box, where he kept his back up joint—gone, down the hatch. He ate the joint as he tore out the bottle of diet pills he had stolen from Mom. If he had this on him he’d go to lockup—again!

“No way policeshnay!”

Gordon dumped all twenty or so pills down the hatch, and could not get a good swallow. This was like trying to eat horse tranquilizers with Ronny Toco after running from those pigs in Tawny Town. Gordon always had an answer though. Beneath his seat was a week old backwash Pepsi—but hell it was his own backwash—so he unscrewed that with a hiss and downed it, allowing some of the pills to get swept down the sewer that was his throat.

He was beginning to panic, then spied Mary the Crack Whore’s cup of coffee from Friday night, still with the lid on it, still somehow miraculously in the passenger side cup holder. Before he forgot in his panic he tossed Mom’s pill bottle out the window, then reached over and grabbed the coffee. He popped off the lid and looked in. To his horror a scum of mold floated on the top from all the goddamned cream she always used. Frozen, and beginning to choke, he turned and looked down the alley ahead and saw the cop pulling in, so down it went, three day old coffee and one day old liquid mold, washing his dear Mom’s diet pills down into the throat of the lost hope who had once been her darling baby—yes, yes, the blue cheese mocha was washing the evidence of his most recent crime down into the pit of despair that was his gut.

He put his hands on the wheel and smiled at the big goddamned wannabe State Trooper who would surely write him a ticket, but have no cause to lock him up. Tickets were things of the future; things of the unpromised realm beyond even tomorrow; things that had no meaning to him.

“Good morning officer,” he said, grinning as he licked the mold from his lips. “How might I help you this morning?”

The cop looked down at him with a distant light of insanity in his eyes, like that time that Bill Hampton had smashed up all that Zanax with the toilet bowl lid and snorted it on the urinal top at the gas station.

His stomach sunk as the cop just stared vacantly through him. “How may I help you officer—delivering a pepperoni pizza to the oldsters up in the Senior Serenity Center. Eating on the run as you do I can well imagine—yikes dude!”

Gordon Stamos’ scrawny butt was being dragged through the window of his car by a big cop with retard strength by the rattail at the base of his balding head. He was now dangling on his tiptoes as the cop held his neck scruff in one hand and pulled out one of those batman batons with his other and snarled, “I ought to beat your head in crack head!”

His left ear lit up with a terrible crack and began to ring like the church bell across the street from the goddamned rehab clinic! Blood was running down his neck as he weaved back against the car and the big maniac cop came with a back hand of the metal baton that smacked into the right side of his head so hard that it wrapped round and bent like a U. His ears ringing like all of the dark bells in hell, Gordon knew that what he saw in the eyes of the cop—as he mumbled whatever he mumbled from the other side of the wall of ringing bells—was beyond reason, beyond murder, so he did what a scrawny crack head does best, ran his ass off!

He had to look back—needed to know if the bullet was coming. As he turned his head and kept on running—a running from the cops trick he had perfected by age 12—he lost all sense of balance and sprawled in the alley, scrapping half his left ear off, gravel embedding in his cheek. As he pressed up he turned the side of his face that was not burning to look over his shoulder and saw the cop, not with his gun drawn, but with his bent baton in hand marching after him like some goddamned Frankenstein retard.

“Oh this is fucked,” he said, without even hearing his well considered words. He rose on unsteady legs, his balance shot to hell, something clicking in his right jaw—a hollow feeling in the ear.

He took one more look at the cop, who seemed to be saying the same thing at regular intervals as he staggered toward Gordon, who took to his heels with one goal in mind, getting away from that freaky cop. He bounced off the wall to the right, tumbled like a ball into the alley, and was up again on unsteady feet bouncing off the other wall, and running like hell, balance or not.

“Catch me if you can you goddamned pig!”

Now it was the world that fell way, not Gordon. His sneakers continued to touch the pavement, a knee occasionally, but stop, he did not—and fall; hell no, Mo! The Pepsi, coffee and diet pills were kicking in, upgrading his ravaged nervous system to damned near childhood levels.