Puke | The Churning

4Apr/103

GET OFF MY LAWN!

I have two quick stories for you. The first is a brief email exchange between me and my old pal Jack Mule (who lives in a land far far away).

From: Jack Mule
Subject: rage much?
you ever find yourself raging when a car alarm wakes up your sleeping baby? I wish i had a brick handy to give that car alarm a real reason to go off.

P.S. GET OFF MY LAWN!

From: JJ
RE: rage much?
You know... around here, car alarms typically mean someone's car is getting fucked with. So when I hear one, instead of feeling annoyed I am like uber-pissed. Not at the car, but at the criminals rampaging in my 'hood.

Someone broke into our car a few weeks ago. I didn't hear the alarm, so I didn't have a chance to react. There was nothing in the car to steal. They simply ransacked through the glove box, etc. Fortunately I'm not dumb enough to leave an mp3 player, CDs, or anything else in there overnight. The repairs we're pretty easy, but I ended up having to shell out the $250 deductible.

Another car was broken into last week in the same spot. That was probably the 5th or 6th since we've lived here.

Rage? Sort of. Every time I hear an alarm, I step outside and look up and down the block hoping I'll catch someone in the act. Fuck em if they try to shoot at me or something. No one is that good of a shot in the dark from a distance.

If I did see them, I don't know what I'd do. There's no way I'd start chasing them. I'd at least hope to get a good mental picture. And maybe I'd start yelling whatever intimidating shit I could think of in the heat of the moment. "I swear to fucking god I will destroy you!" or some bullshit like that.

That's story #1. It illustrates the facts that Philadelphia is crime-ridden and I am a little reckless. Story #2 (haha I said 'number 2') corroborates those facts.

A couple weeks ago while I was at work, Lulu saw a suspicious dude parked on our street in a beat up late 90's Mustang. It's not particularly rare to see suspicious people on our street and Lulu probably would have ignored him, but she was ironing in the living room and could see this guy sitting in his car from our front window. The guy was a tall, lanky, ratty-haired white guy in a leather jacket. She could see him, but he didn't realize it.

Side note: If he were black, I may have left his race out of the story because it could be perceived as racist to include that seemingly irrelevant detail. But he was white. And that's atypical in this part of Philly. So in this case I think it's relevant. And it helps you form a better mental picture of the scenario.

Anyway, this dude was sitting in his car much longer than could be considered normal. He was either waiting for someone, or he was up to something. Then she saw him pull some sort of kit out of his pocket. Tiny supplies of some sort. Maybe some tin foil. Perhaps a small tube. And definitely a lighter.

The guy lit up whatever it was and inhaled. He started coughing immediately. And after a couple of hits, the coughing got so out of control that he puked a little on his shirt and jacket. The guy was bombed. The puke didn't bother him a bit. He relaxed in his car for a few minutes, then got up and wobbled down the block and into a house.

We live on a block of rowhomes in Center City Philly. We know our next door neighbors and the people across the street. Families. Good people. But we don't know everyone on the block. There are a few people who live on the block that I've never even spoken to. People I'm not really interested in talking to. He went into one of those houses.

That's when I got home from work. Lulu told me the whole story. I really didn't know how to react. On one hand - who gives a shit if a guy wants to get high in his own car? On the other hand - fuck him; that piece of shit degenerate doesn't belong anywhere near my family.

We decided to leave the guy a note. I really hoped he wouldn't see me. I wasn't looking for a confrontation. I just wanted him to get the message.

I wanted the message to be straightforward and easy to understand. I thought that if I used profanity, it would sound insincere. He had to know I was serious. And he had to feel shame. Also - like a note from a kidnapper, I wanted it to be unidentifiable to prevent him from knocking on our door wanting to retort. I grabbed an empty unmarked brown paper bag and wrote on it with a Sharpie in big capital letters. Then I left the note on his windshield under the driver's side wiper, face down like a parking ticket. Here's what I wrote:

YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.
GO GET HIGH SOMEWHERE ELSE.
NEXT TIME I'M CALLING THE COPS.

I decided to go with 'cops' instead of 'police', hoping to retain a conversational tone. I kept it clean, while emphasizing a feeling that we live in a neighborhood where people know each other.

The guy came out a couple hours later, read the note, threw it on the ground, and drove off in a hurry. There's a pretty big chance he didn't give a shit. For all I know he thought "fuck you, unknown random stranger" and drove home to smoke some more of whatever it was.

But I hope that's not the case. I hope he felt like he intruded on a safe place with his bullshit. I hope he thought about it A LOT. For hours on end. While watching TV at home later that night. I hope he agonized over it. I hope he felt scrutinized and judged. I hope he felt weak.

Tagged as: drugs, philly, puke 3 Comments

6Mar/103

Disgusting story with a happy ending

No not that kind of happy ending. You are a sick sick pervert. This story is from a person named Alexandria - which kind of seems weird to me because that's also the name of a city. She posted this as a comment, but I think it deserves its very own post.

Ok so a really hot boy asked me on a date i had been waiting for him to do this for months so when he did i of course said YES!! (little did i know it was on a boat and i get VIOLENTLY!! sick on boats) so we got to the dock and i wanted to say something but i decided that i would be ok so i got on the boat. later i started to feel a little sick but not to bad so i STILL didn't say anything! he turned to kiss me and i leaned in but suddenly it felt like i had gotten punched in the gut and i knew i was going to puke so i turned but i didn't turn fast enough so i ended up puking in his mouth! it was terrible finally i turned and puked into the water. then i turned back to him in time to see him puking off the side of the boat also! it was SO embarrassing! i ended up puking and dry heaving about 5 more times before we got back and he puked one more time......

it was mortifying but he called me back in about a week and we got married 5yrs l8r !!!!!!

Congrats, Alexandria. You married the kind of guy who doesn't mind tasting someone else's puke. Tee hee.

Tagged as: puke 3 Comments

5Feb/096

South Philly Drunk

I woke up Sunday night to the sounds of a drunken madman and a barking dog. It was 3am and I had to get up for work in a couple of hours. The dude was completely bombed, slurring as he yelled. "Yahhh! Hooatyah!" I still have no idea what he was saying. Just spontaneous random syllables.

I put a pillow over my head to block the noise and tried to go back to sleep. Of course that failed. Feathers and cotton are no match for a South Philly drunk.

My wife and I live in a rowhome on a small residential street. From our second story window, we can see the entire block. It's great for those Rear Window moments where the neighbors are fighting and you're just waiting for them to literally kill one another. But I digress...

I crawled out of bed, headed over to the window, and looked down toward the street trying to identify the stumbling buffoon. There he was, right below my bedroom window sitting on the bumper of my neighbor's car. He was talking to the dog. I mean - he was yelling. But he wasn't yelling at the dog. It's more like he was yelling to the dog. It looked like a conversation. No anger in his voice at all. He was just loud and rambling.

The guy was in his 40's or 50's. A black dude talking to a pitbull without a leash. Even while sitting on the car bumper, his was doing the drunken head bobbing thing that people do when they've had way too many drinks. It's like when you're driving late at night and you're exhausted. Your head starts to dip as your eyelids slowly close. But before your neck bends to the point where your chin meets your chest you are suddenly startled awake by some internal safety system. He looked like that - as if he might fall down onto the pavement at any second - constantly catching himself in time.

A quick aside... As I mentioned, I have no idea what the guy was saying. He was yelling as loud as he possibly could - a string of jibberish. But was I the only one who couldn't understand? I'm a white guy, and in my neighborhood I'm definitely in the minority. There are a lot of times that I can't understand what my sober neighbors are saying. Even after living in downtown Tampa and center city Philly, surrounded by people of various races and backgrounds, the black urban dialect still escapes me. It's fast while mumbling, foreign sounding, and riddled with slang terms I don't recognize. So while I claim this dude was screaming jibberish, it's certainly possible that my neighbors understood every word of it.

After watching for a few minutes, I got sick of the 3am show. Dude was boring. The same shit over and over. I crawled back into bed and tried to get some sleep.

What am I, an idiot? It was completely impossible. I had already tried blocking out the noise with a pillow and failed. I should mention that my beautiful wife slept through the whole thing. I am a very light sleeper.

I thought of a handful of solutions. I could open the window and tell the guy to shut the fuck up. I could tell him to go away. I could lie and tell him my wife is trying to sleep. What good would that do? Guy was crazy drunk. And he didn't speak my same language. He was clearly American and I assume he was speaking English - just not in a way I understood. For all I know he was yelling in slang "I'M GONNA SHOOT THE FIRST WHITE PERSON I SEE!" or "IF ANYONE TELLS ME TO SHUT UP, I'LL THROW A ROCK THROUGH THEIR WINDOW!" I really couldn't be sure.

Then there were the passive solutions. I could go downstairs and start my day early. Send a few work related emails at 3:30am. My bosses would be happy knowing I put in a couple extra hours. Or maybe I'd put on some music or watch TV. That might drown out the noise and lull me to sleep.

As all of these ideas raced through my head, I just laid there staring at the ceiling. The clock kept ticking and I was still awake and doing nothing.

Then about an hour after it began, I heard my next door neighbor yelling at the dude. She's a strong and persuasive black woman. A woman who works with her hands, drives a pickup truck, and has biceps as big as my thighs. I didn't completely understand what she was yelling either, but I got the message. "Go away. Get away from my house. We don't want you here."

I raced to the window to watch the aftermath. I imagined maybe he'd get belligerent and start breaking things. Maybe she'd have to rush outside and beat him down.

When I got to the window he was still sitting on the bumper. The yelling from both sides had stopped. Dude was silent, staring down at the pavement. His head was in his hands. His elbows rested on his knees. His knees spread wide. As if he was making sure he had enough room between his feet for... Yeah... Vomit.

Dude spewed what appeared to be shredded chicken in a brown sauce. Maybe chicken wings. Maybe chicken stew. Quart after quart. Maybe a gallon or more.

And yeah - you might have seen this coming.... The fucking dog started licking it up. Regurgitated chicken wings are pure ambrosia to a pitbull. Slurp slurp slurp. It was hard to tell from a distance, but I think the dog was smiling.

That was enough to ruin my night. The drama was over and I had these horrible images in my brain. I tried to go back to sleep now that the noise was gone. No luck. I was too freaked out. And I had to get up for work in an hour. Fucking South Philly drunk.

Tagged as: drinking, philly, puke 6 Comments

23Jun/085

One of Life’s Defining Moments

Everyone has those childhood events that seem to change their life forever - the stories that still give you the douche chills when you think back about them. My story ends with me covered in vomit.

This story starts in seventh grade. We were bussed from the burbs out to the projects in downtown Tampa for school. The bus ride was like 45 minutes each way. And when I say the projects, I'm not exaggerating. The school was in the very center of a low income housing complex. One of my best friends at school was a drug dealer named Star. He sold joints and Now & Laters on campus.

I'm totally getting off track - but remind me later to tell you about the time I got knocked the fuck out by a ghetto ruffian while I stood outside the school building waiting for first period.

I was a skate rat back then. A skinny skater fag with long blond hair in my face and retarded black pants with skulls printed all over them. I think I thought I looked cool and maybe even tough. Nope. I was a fucking mess.

Anyway, I remember the entire day, because it's burned into my memory like a near death experience. I won't bore you with extraneous details. But I will tell you what I ate. My mom used to buy these frozen glazed donuts. You'd pop a couple of them into the microwave and they'd be all warm and soft. I think I ate two of them for breakfast that day.

By lunchtime, my stomach was cramping up. I thought for sure I was just hungry. You know the feeling. It's that pre-flu weakness where you're all cold and hot at the same time. Sweaty with the chills. I get a similar feeling sometimes when I haven't eaten in a really long time. So I thought I was hungry - I couldn't wait for lunch.

I sat down with my friends and housed a PB&J and a big bag of white seedless grapes. Dude I'm telling you this is so fucked up. That was almost twenty years ago and I still remember what I ate for lunch.

So the afternoon went on and I began feeling even worse. The food didn't help me. But I figured I could hang on until I got home. It would have been silly to have one of my parents drive 45 minutes out to the hood to pick me up when school was almost over anyway. So I fucking got on the bus like an dumbass.

I sat down next to a window about halfway toward the back of the bus. Wearing my stupid skull print skater pants and a hoodie. About 30 minutes into the ride home I could feel the saliva start to flood my mouth. You know the feeling. I'm telling you right now, if you have a weak stomach stop reading.

I kept swallowing it down, that saliva flow. I was conscious of the situation. Stop after stop, kids would hop off the bus. And I was counting down the minutes till we got to my subdivision. I knew it was only a matter of time before I could go inside my own house and puke in the toilet like a normal human being.

So I swallowed. And swallowed. I began to think that if a little puke came up I could just swallow that too. We were almost to my stop.

There were maybe another 15 kids on the bus when I reached my breaking point. I would have yelled out for the driver to pull over. I would have opened the window at least to puke out of it. But it was too late. It was coming up - and it was coming up fast.

Like a fucking fire hose, a half digested combination of donuts and peanut butter and grapes and juice splashed into my stupid skull pants. I tried to hold out the front of my hoodie to catch it so it wouldn't flow down the floor of the bus into the other rows. That was just wave one. Then another wave and another. I had no control whatsoever. The vomit kept flowing.

Kids all around me jumped up and ran toward the front and back of the bus screaming. The driver didn't know what was going on. Maybe she thought it was a fight or something. But no - that evening, she was going to be cleaning puke off the floor of her only means of income.

When the puke fest ended, we were only a minute from my house. The driver didn't even realize what had happened until we stopped at my street. I trudged off the bus, dripping puke everywhere. I was soaked from my chest down to my knees in thick odorous sludge.

When I got home, I dumped my clothes into the washing machine, took a shower, and crawled into bed. I didn't go back to school for two weeks. Sure I had the flu. That was a valid reason for the first week. The second week - that was pure embarrassment. I wondered if home schooling were an option.

By the time I made it back to school, no one said anything. No one made fun of me. I guess some other drama came up in the meantime. Maybe there was a fight at school while I was home sick. Or maybe someone got arrested for selling weed. Who knows what kind of shit went down while I was away. At least in my friends' minds, my little drama was forgotten. But I know I'll never forget it.

P.S. If you want to share your fucked up story from childhood, email it to me and I'll post it for you (anonymously if you prefer). I'm thechurning AT gmail DAWT com. Or just add it as a comment.

P.P.S. Can you believe it's been two whole fucking years since Puke Week?!?!

Tagged as: childhood, embarrassing, puke 5 Comments

29Mar/0715