Bhudda Takes A Walk...

Bhudda takes a walk… It was almost closing at the Greentop, and me and Joey were outside having a smoke before last call. We stood on the sidewalk in the rain, puffing and spraying each other with spittle every time we talked. Kenny, the bartender, had been feeding us shots to go with the tallboys we’d been tipping since we got out of work, so we were a little sloppy. “Hey, hey Tom, hey, is it me, or do my balls itch?” he scowled at me , the butt of his cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth, so short he must’ve been smoking the filter. His eyes were red, the stubble on his chin at least three days old. He puffed once more, then pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, flicked it out into the street. It hit the wet pavement with a ‘ssst!’ and the glowing orange coal went suddenly dark. “Ah don fuggin know, man, I don’t really know,” I mumbled, lighting another cigarette off the butt of my last one before flicking it after Joey’s into the street. It fizzled out in the wet asphalt and the rain just kept falling. “Fuck you!” he came at me swinging, so I stepped to the side. His right hook continued in its trajectory and he wound up punching the light pole I was leaning against. I lost my footing on the curb and stepped into the gutter, submerging my scuffed and tattered work boots in the cold flow to the storm drain. “Ahhh, fuck!” we both said in unison, both laughing and falling into each other. He tried to knee me in the groin, but I blocked it and tried to throw him; he grabbed me and we both wound up rolling on the ground. “I’m gonna eat your children! I’ll bite their fuckin heads off like rats! You fuck! You fuckin rat fuck!” He was drooling a little so I tried to keep him on the bottom as we struggled. This was about the time I started thinking about the fourth twelve-hour shift we’d worked this week, how the darkness never seemed to leave us alone, the sun rising after we got to work, setting before we left work, and raining all the time anyway. So we make this escape, into a different, more personal darkness… We heard the bar door open, spilling Johnny Cash. I turned to look, and just caught a glimpse of his rainbow colored baja and stringy red dreadlocks before Joey flipped me over again, grinding my cheekbone into the concrete. “Looks like somebody forgot their prosac today,” he said over his pouch of American Spirit. He seemed to be squinting through the rain, watching Joey stand over me with one foot on the back of my neck and his arms raised triumphantly. “Fuck that hippy shit, got ‘ny tina?” Joey had lost a couple of teeth to his fondness for meth, and the increased amplitude of his constant state of mania. “Never touch the stuff,” he said around licking the gum of the paper as he twisted up a cigarette. I picked myself up and looked at him, realizing the squint was permanent, due his own weakness for weed.

“Looks like you been touchin’ somethin’ ‘sides yer own cock, nature boy,” I spat blood into the gutter. Joey patted me on the back hard enough to make me stumble into Shaggy. He recoiled and tried to brush away the mud and grime my shoulder left on his hippy-hoodie. “Oh, yeah, well, you guys could probably use some of that, from the looks of it. How about we go ‘round back and blaze, maybe I can introduce you to Nirvana…” “She got a sister?” Joey asked, ”I ain’t never had no oh-ree-ental pussy. Is it true their shit is sideways? Must make a funny noise on the sliding board…” “Naah, man, he’s talkin’ ‘bout that band; didn’t hear that guy’s dead? Shot himself with a 12 guage, guess he wanted to make sure he wouldn’t come back; can’t say I blame him,you get a look at that chick he was fuckin’?” we followed Pigpen down the alley that went behind the bar. Rats scurried from under the dumpsters as we passed. I kicked one as it passed; it sailed through the air into the side of a dumpster and it rang like a gong. The rat fell to the ground and kicked, twitching, until it shook it off and frantically scrambled away. “What’d that little guy do to you? Oh, what’s your name anyway, everybody calls me Nugget.” “Tom-“ “Everybody calls me asshole,” Joey said. He had found an old fortyounce beer bottle and tossed back the way we came. A second later there was a crash, and someone started screaming. “Wow, you guys need this more than I thought. Guess you never heard of Loving-Kindness…” “Is that like loving ass-crack? I don’t know what you had in mind, but we ain’t into no fag-shit.” Joey was getting that look in his eye. “What’re you, one of those fuckin Jesus freaks? I got locked up with one of them, had to beat his head against the wall till he shut the fuck up. Cost me six more months for assault, but in the end it was worth it…” “No,” Nugget had rounded the corner of the building and put his back to the wall. He turned back to look around the corner when a second voice joined the first out front, screaming even louder. No one came down the alley, so he turned back and pulled out a colorful little hand-blown glass jar. He pulled the cork and the acrid smell of sinsemilla flooded our filthy little space, momentarily overcoming the urine and the dumpsters. “No, I’m a Bhuddist.” He pulled his rolling papers from his front pocket and started breaking up a bud with the automated motions of someone who’s done it too many times to count. “Ahm a drunkist,” Joey was staring at the rain up in the sky. He looked bored. That was probably bad. “Oh, you guys'll get a kick outta this,” he licked the gum and twisted,”Like the basic premise of the whole philosophy,”he pinched the tip and put the entire joint in his mouth, leaving a slug-trail of saliva on the paper,”Its like your brain, its like this big network for your whole nervous

system, so like everything you see, or hear, or feel, or smell, all gets sorted out by your brain, so, basically, its like the whole universe is inside your head!” He roasted it over the flame of his butane lighter to dry the spit, then bit the end and lit it. “NO FUCKING WAY!”Joey put his hands to the side of his head as Nugget passed to me,”you mean if we could see inside your fuckin' head, we would see all the stars and planets and shit swirlin' around in there?” His eyes were a little bugged, and a fine spray of spittle mixed with the rain settling into Nugget's beard. “Yeah, I'm seeing them right now...”Nugget said as he exhaled a cloud that soon encompassed all of us.”Totally..” I was busy with the joint, so I don't know where Joey got the fuckin' car battery, guess somebody dumped it behind the bar. He just came out of the shadows with it over his head and ran straight at Nugget, swinging it into his face. His forehead kinda folded back into the bricks, and when Joey pulled back it made a sticky sound; his eyes had popped and the juice was running down his cheeks, mixing with the blood and brains. His legs folded and he fell forward on the asphalt. “Shit,” I said. “That guy's full o' shit, there ain't nuthin' in there but brains!”he flicked a piece of skull back to see the scrambled grey-pink mess.”Fuckin liar.” I passed him the joint, and we started walking home.