Fast Eddie Friday......Just plain crazy

Fox 4 just ran a short piece on the Glore Psychiatric Museum. You can view some pics and commentary on the Saint Joe museum here. The story got me to thinking about the crazy people I've crossed paths with over the years. Crazy people fascinate me, always have. The first truly insane person I ever encountered was the mother of a childhood friend. The kids name was Pat, we were budding juvenile delinquents back in the day. Pats father worked at a transmission shop, he looked like String Bean from the Grand Old Opry, he permanently smelled like transmission fluid, was perpetually drunk, mean as hell, and an easy mark. I'd spend the night at Pats, was probably 12 0r 13 at the time. Pats old man would come home drunk as Cooter Brown, smack Pat or one of his three brothers around, then pass out. Once we were sure the old prick was deep asleep, Pat would belly crawl across his bedroom floor, lift his wallet and liberate his cash and his car keys. The keys fit a pale yellow early 1960's Lincoln. We spent many a night, barely able to see over the dash or reach the pedals, tearing up the streets of Waldo and the South end of KC. Somehow we managed, and we would usually end up at Sambo's restaurant on Bannister road, well after midnight.

Pats father was a mean spirited drunk, but he wasn't crazy. Pats mother however was as crazy as an Arizona road lizard. I'm talking bat shit insane. Her hair was always fucked up, her doo was a cross between a bouffant 60's style and Buckwheat of little Rascals fame. His mother was the original Butter Face. She had that crazy hair that looked like she had been electrocuted, her face had red patches and open sores from digging at it, and she was joop eyed, one eye was half closed while the other seemed to constantly bounce around in its socket. As faces go, hers was none too nice to look at. She also had a tendency to walk around the house mostly naked. For a crazy lady with 4 kids, she had a killer body, at least as I remember it. Then again, in the eyes of a just pubed boy, maybe any female flesh looked good. Time has a way of softening the edges of our memory. Like a photographers lens with a thin coating of Vaseline, the rough edges softened, the hard lines blurred. So maybe her body wasn't all that rockin, but that's how I remember it. Hence the original Butter Face analogy, everything looked good, butter face.

Pats mom would have periods of lucidity, seeming almost normal, then she would relapse into long stretches of pure insanity. She would eat from the trash can. I recall one day when we walked in the house only to find her sitting in the middle of the kitchen, in her underwear, eating garbage like it was a KC strip from Morton's. Coffee grounds and eggshells clinging to her face, chewing away at God knows what. I had to look away, so I focused on her breasts, which were unencumbered and quite spectacular for a 30 something woman with four kids. Kids can be viscous little bastards, and we were no exception. During one of her semi lucid periods, we taped 3 smoke bombs to the window unit a/c, lit them, then ran through the house yelling fire. As the house filled with smoke, Pats crazy mother ran outside buck naked, followed by an extremely pissed off transmission mechanic in boxer shorts. Pats old man chased him around the front yard, well after midnight, while the neighbors peered from their front porches and out their windows.

Somehow, maybe Divine intervention or perhaps blind luck, Pat turned out to be pretty normal. He grew up, managed to avoid following me to boys homes and prisons, despite his having a family as fucked up as a soup sandwich, while my own was relatively normal. His other brothers, not so much. One is up in the Crossroads serving life for a contract killing, another is long since dead by his own hand, and the third is living in Grandview, over 50, still trying his best to be a teenaged deadbeat. As for his father, he drank himself to death years ago. Pats mother is still living. Housed in a residential group home, her madness quelled by medication and old age. I spoke to the deadbeat brother in Grandview about a year ago, he filled me in, then proceeded to hit me up for money. I'm sure Pats mom no longer is possessed of that body, at least not as I remember it, if it ever did look that good. Like I said, we often see the past through a fuzzy lens. What I know is this; Every time I smell transmission fluid I think of Pats drunken father, and there are few things in life more disconcerting than a mostly naked woman eating trash in her kitchen.

True Story.

The smell of cat pee was a dead give away.

I'm sure I am not alone on this one, every kid must have grown up with a cat lady in the neighborhood. My personal childhood crazy cat woman was also a dog napper. I had this dog , collie mix named Frisky, and the crazy woman who lived a few doors up kept stealing him. She would open our gate and coax Frisky out of our back yard. She must have done it a half dozen times. In addition to being a dog napper, and crazy as a shit house rat, she collected cats. I remember the noise that emanated through my bedroom window in the spring and summer. Cats in heat make some spooky noises, especially if you are 6 or 7. I was convinced she was a witch, and most likely eating children, hence the screams. Too many Hansel and Gretal type fairy tales can really screw a kid up.

So this story on MSN reminded me of my own Cat Lady. This woman had 117 cats, not all alive, one raccoon and one rabbit. She gets pinched for shoplifting, cat food. The cops said she smelled like cat piss, go figure. I'm less concerned that she was crazy enough to have 117 cats running loose in her house, and more intrigued by the addition to her cat clan, of one pet coon and a rabbit. I always wanted a raccoon, a monkey or a skunk, but I had enough sanity to realize that they probably wouldn't make the greatest pets. The rabbit must have felt like his ticket could get punched any second.

** The picture is from Russia, where a woman has 130 cats in an amazingly clean room.****

Dumpster Diners

Okay, enough with the green movement already. After reading an article today in the Star about a movement known as freecycling, I am officially refusing to re-use, recycle or reconsider. The Freecyling trashy people in the star's article eat trash. You heard me right, they eat trash, and not because they are homeless, not because they are broke, although Im sure they aren't rolling in the dough, heh. No these chuckleheads are making a statement that we waste too much shit in general, and edible shit in particular.



Look, I was in the waste management/ recycling industry in it's infancy, in fact that's the business I went to prison over, so Im not completely in the dark over our current need to do shit for the environment, I get it, mmmmkay. What I don't get is how some doofus rooting through the garbage, is going to impact the environment in a positive manner. My grandmother used to get old produce from the super market in Marlow Oklahoma to feed to her chickens, that I get. My step father, a world class douche bag and first rate tight ass would stop and go through peoples shit at the curb. He had plenty of money, but he was a cheap bastard, so if there was something he could sell at a garage sale down the road, he would stop and pick it up before the trash man got it. That I get as well. What I cant fathom is why on earth anyone in their right mind would dig through a dumpster and eat something of questionable origin , if they had other options, like buying some fucking food.



To each his own, whatever floats your boat, trips your trigger, rings your bell, etc. Still, it begs the question, how does eating garbage help save the whales, protect the red woods, or the elusive spotted owl? How does it help save landfill space? Answer, It doesn't. Food decomposes into nothingness, pretty fast, so it's not like they are eating styrofoam . My point to all of this babbling is this. Ive never understood the overly zealous types that seem to always go to the extreme. Whether it be chaining yourself to a tree to keep it from being cut down, or chowing down on someones garbage, its too fucking much, regardless of how well intentioned the loony tune activist might be. In the end they just come off as crazy, and do more to hurt their cause than help it.

Soap and Suds Surrealism

Saturday I made a trip to the local laundry mat due to the washing machine in my building being out of order. I could have gone to one of the local hipster places that serve beer and have big screen tv, instead, I opted to go to the Wacky mat on 39th street west of Southwest Trafficway.

On first arriving I figured I had picked the right place. There was only one other person there, a late 20's early 30's something woman. She didn't seem crazy, and didn't omit any noxious odors. In fact she was a really good looking woman, coffee with cream colored skin, almond shaped eyes, the right bumps in all the right places and a v neck sweater that was so revealing I could see all the way to ........., well, you get the picture. So I'm thinking its not going to be so bad.

Across the street there is one of those tax places, a short pudgy guy is doing the Statue of Liberty bit, waving at cars as they pass by. After awhile he is joined by another Statue of Liberty, this one a woman. A guy in an Uncle Sam outfit is with her and carrying a chair. When they get out to the curb Uncle Sam puts the chair down and Miss Liberty takes a seat. WTF, since when does the symbol of Liberty and Tax preparation sit? Are they using handicapped or injured workers in the hope of flagging down some sympathetic person who just happens to be looking for someone to do his taxes? Maybe its a metaphorical take on the whole immigration debate since most of the customers coming in and out of the tax place seem to be of Hispanic dissent. Perhaps the people who own the tax place are members of the Minute Men and this is their way of saying, " enough already with your tired, your poor, Your huddle masses yearning to breath free, I need a break".

As I am sitting in one of those hard plastic Laundry mat chairs, looking at the twin Liberty's and glancing over at the Nubian laundry princesses twins hoping to see them liberated, in walks character number 3. A woman in her late 40's to early fifties with a price chopper grocery cart parked outside. She steps through the door with 2 pillow cases stuffed full of dirty clothes. She dumps both loads in to a single washer, crams them in so full that the lid barely shuts. She feeds the machine some quarters, and no soap. She the proceeds over to the television bolted to the wall and begins to carry on a lengthy conversation in fluent gibberish. This goes on for a few minutes while Foxy Brown and I exchange knowing glances that we are clearly in the presence of someone whose elevator is stuck between floors.

I make my way outside to have a smoke and to be close to my car in case the shopping cart lady goes crazy, pulls a meat cleaver from under one of the 4 sweaters she is wearing, and hacks Ms. Brown to pieces. Someone has to remain alive to call the cops and an ambulance, and I figure it may as well be me. Besides things are starting to pick up across the street at the tax place. Apparently in the world of big time advertisement and instant tax returns, the more people you can dress up like caricatures of patriotic symbolism the better. In the 5 minutes it took me to smoke, 2 more uncle Sam's and yet another Statue of Liberty appeared at the curb across the street. It was a giant bobble head mascot like Statue of Liberty. Just as things were picking up across the street, the crazy lady came out of the Laundry mat and went next door to the second hand children's store, talking to her imaginary friend all the way .

I went back inside and threw my stuff in to several dryers. After about 10 minutes or so the crazy lady came back with a newly acquired duckling. It was a stuffed toy and much to my dismay not a real duck. I guess she was in need of a well worn ,stained, stuffed duck, and really, who isn't? The crazy lady picked up her conversation with the duck, where she had left off from her earlier exchange with the television.

So there I sat, at 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning in a Laundry mat in midtown. To my left were waving Statues of Liberty, Uncle Sam's and one freakish looking ,wobble headed ,mascot like ,Statue of Liberty. Directly in front of me was a really nice display of cleavage, and to my right a crazy woman was talking to a toy duck. It was surreal, and the reason why I love living here. You just don't see this kind of shit in the burbs.