ㄒ卄乇 Ꮆ尺乇乇几 ᗪㄩ匚Ҝ

Garbage had piled so high on the streets of that rotten city that most people had desensitized themselves to the stench. This is what I think of when I look back at the Big City. A place where everything was fake, and anything real felt stolen. As a younger man with less of a glare I was enthralled, of course - 24/7 hour everything, no courtesies like politics or religion. The smut was truly an itch, so fiendishly erogenous that I didn't care about the coffee-grain dirt I was scratching right into it. Women keep telling me how handsome I am, and I tell them to clean my fingernails. That's what they like to hear. I didn't have a job, for years. I didn't want one, so some black guy at DeLuxe Excellent on 32nd and Trebonne got stubborn and insisted that I become a bouncer - this went terribly, but the black guy became my best friend, and then he disappeared. I was still a bouncer - like a bunny hopping around... I kept getting beat up by guys that were bigger than me, which started a small trend among club owners to fire any bouncer that lost a fight and to hire the guy that won. After getting invited to a Bouncer Convention I quit. I had been to so many conventions in my youth, and I knew how thin they could stretch whatever niche they had. Time passes, I get a job at the post office but lose it after I start collecting my own mail at work - apparently a clerk isn't allowed to, and the postmaster ended up using me as an example in an instructional video on what not to do. More time passes. Black guy comes back, says he got too many kids to pay for and had to get a vacation, we have beers, he says he found something new. I tell him I'm scheduled to surgically break my leg at the veterinarian's office the next day, and he sort of laughs and tells me about the job anyways, smoking up some gratuitous cigar as the strippers onstage discreetly eyed his bills to make sure they were real. Everything was fake in that city - I don't blame her. Everything was so fake that anything real felt stolen. The local currency wouldn't just inflate, it would crumble and wither if not handled with utmost delicacy - an intentional mechanism so as to discourage bank runs or any instances of frantic cash movement. At one point money-couriers had become popular, for they could pull an entire wheelbarrow of this awful currency and only lose a note or two to friction. Guns were fake, knives couldn't be sharpened, and horses were seen as meat or glue. God did I want to ride a horse on the outskirts of that city. So many hills, so endlessly away from the terrible racket and fervor below. He told me about the job, but it involved engineering and electricity and I told him the men in my family are only good for one thing: coming up with quotes, sayings, jokes. At least my uncle has come up with so many, but it's not like I can tell people that. I just get to hear them first. He doesn't get paid, besides his joke books. I told him he should show me how to write my own joke book - it sounded like a decent enough time - and he replied that it was the hardest thing he had ever done, and he once wrote a five-volume book series on the history of mold in Western society. I brought my buddy home, then came back to my place to find a note on my door. I left it there, in case whoever placed it regretted it in the morning. I don't need to open notes at this junction in my life. The handwriting looks measured, masculine. A strange rubber-stamped duck is half-there in the corner. Almost so green I could barely see it in the dark. My head was pounding, and I could hear my neighbor negotiating with some loud, marble-mouthed thug over some hard drugs. The man kept laughing and teasing this sad plight my poor neighbor had stumbled upon. I could hear a dog in there, which my building did not allow. The thug broke his lamp, and then started kicking at our shared wall, over and over again, until his foot broke through and I grabbed it with all my strength and tore the drug dealer's boot off, which sent a treasure trove of paraphernalia flying as he went quiet and began to beg for his boot back through the foot-shaped hole. I obliged, and he threw it back, saying he wanted his "shit in the boot." I gave him my badge and told him he's got twenty seconds til I call this in. My badge. In a fake city, the best thing a man can have is a fake badge.