Cruddy - Lynda Barry [1]
And in the next cubicle the restrained and tripping Vicky Talluso was screaming, “DON’T YOU NARC ME OUT, ROBERTA! IF YOU NARC ME OUT I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL KILL YOU!”
But the author didn’t want to narc anyone out. All she wanted to do was deliver the fantastic message of Truth plus Magical Love equals Freedom, but this was obviously a message the police and the mother could not comprehend.
And rushed to the operating room was the Love Interest, also tripping violently and hemorrhaging internally, and it was not looking good for the Love Interest, and the police were asking me if I had any information, did I know how he fell, how long he was laying there, about the slashes, the knife wounds, about his hereditary medical condition, did I know where his parents were, did I have any information at all besides the fact that he was the love of my life?
Meanwhile, back at the ranch where the author was getting screamed at by the mother for ACCIDENTALLY bashing IDIOT SISTER JULIE on the head with the nail polish remover, AN ACCIDENT, the author was sitting very still on a ripped kitchen chair and staring at the chunks of crud on the floor. The mother is what they call a main character. The mother is a very main character who says I live to torment her, that I only wailed the Cutex Nail Polish Remover bottle at the head of Julie because I want to torment her, who says the reason I do anything is just to torment her.
Now you need to know the scenery. First the house. The address. 1619 East Crawford. A rental in a row of rentals all the same, all very hideous on a dead-end road between Black Cat Lumber and the illegal dumping ravine. People have been heaving off old mattresses and old stoves and dead dogs ever since I can remember even though there is a huge nailed-up sign that says NO DUMPING! VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED! But in all the time of our living here I have never seen anyone get prosecuted once. I don’t think a prosecutor even exists.
In the garbage ravine there is a nude man who crouches among the trash piles and his name is Old Red and he has very yellow skin like freezer-burned chicken and his thing in life is to suddenly run out and do a two-second display of his dinger and then run back in. People say he is actually a businessman, an executive at Boeing, very high up. I have never seen Old Red, but I believe in him. There have been nights when I have heard the drifting sound of his lonely yodels.
Our house slants. Like if you lay a jar on the floor of the kitchen area it will start rolling very rapidly. The back of the house is shoved right into the dirt of the hill and the front is on sinking wooden legs and there are scabby gray streaks all over the beige paint and wet chunks of mold growing all over the roof and there is a broken TV antenna that turns in the wind and makes noises that will freak the bravest person out.
There are a lot of trees behind the house, mostly scrub maple and pine and a lot of nasty smells that come from the garbage ravine and more nasty smells that come from the mud in front of the house and all day there is the sound of the loudspeaker calling in the lumberyard for Mike. Mike to the front desk. Mike, you got a call on line three. Mike to the loading dock. And I have watched out of my window to see which one is Mike, which one of the men on the forklifts inserting the smashed-flat Dracula teeth under