Home
Jungle Tales 1 (sketches)
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Creative
- Hits: 1978
And finally getting round to scanning in some images and finishing up some outstanding creative projects that have been preying upon my mind...
The time away, it allows me to be critical, and there's a whole lot there I don't like. This is one, that if I reduce in size enough, I do...
Vintage Postcard
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
- Hits: 1892
Vintage postcard, found at thriftshop. Guessing CC.
Benji, King of the Temps
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 2911
He's introduced by the other temps, their awe comes through in the introduction, he needs no introduction...we've met him already.
It's Benji, King of the Temps. Benjamin - Benji - the classic temp, missing his front teeth, but in a charming way, Native American, off the reserve, he'd done time in Montana, 10 years or so, couldn't quite explain why, assault, etc. Short, muscular, built in the upper body, the top 2 1/2 feet, but spindly in his legs and with slight and delicate little hands for such a pugilist. He speaks 12 languages, Cree, Ojibwa, Navajo, Cherokee, more even, none you'd know, he knows the Sioux, thinks I might have a claim, but they're from the US,..
"...They were sentenced to be hanged. No attorneys or witnesses were allowed as a defense for the accused, and many were convicted in less than five minutes of court time with the judge..."
Beni's lazy, he shows up for work, on the Temps Bus, every day, and it's his regularity and bullshit, not performance, that recommends him. He's become King of the Temps. He can be found cleaning up the site, gesturing towards the work that needs to be done with an empty magnet, he's the air of authority and knowledge that the other temps respond to, it seems absurd, really, but he's got an elevated status with the other Native-American temps, a sort of god-king thing going, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse now...you can find him anywhere, everywhere, bullshitting about what he's doing, what he's done, but always the empty magnet, or the empty garbage bag (if he's been off collecting bottles & cans...), he directs the other temps towards the nastier jobs and walks himself in the other direction, he knows them all, when the regulars go missing he tells us on what charges and for how long.
He disappears, weeks on end, he's been charged with assault, punching a police officer, hard to reconcile with the Benji we know, Drunk & Disorderly, well, that's easy, passed out on somebody's lawn and he's woken with a start and punching blindly, we all know the feeling...
Over lunch he's on the phone with "his attorney", business concluded he sets up a golf date, he wants to play chess with me, a bit of an intellectual as well, and so I try him on the mental chess, his response is to shout out the name of the pieces he knows, "Horse" or "Castle-thingy", he's got a whole host of middle class aspirations, the company was dangling the temp-to-perm carrot in front of him, he's lurching for the bait, can't wait until he gets on permanent, he's going to buy a truck, a Mustang, a Camero, a Harley Davidson, he's gonna make the temps work, too, put them into teams, give them deadlines, he's got it all planned out, if they don't perform they get DNR'd (do not returned) on their slips, he's a born leader. If he doesn't go back to jail, the hearing's in a few weeks, there's a possibility given his abundant priors that he might be away for some while...
Mos Eisley
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 3061
And the other Italian Waiter, the new one, wants to go for drinks, celebrate my return, a week back in hell, but even hell can become monotonous...
Drinks at an old watering hole, I owe the bartender this, she's related to the jeweler who declined all my "diamonds", they've recovered their old manager, a genius of the food and beverage industry, it's good to see him, we chat, he buys us a drink...
...then onward, gay bar, same-old, same-old, he likes it, likes how free everyone is there, I'm a bit bored...
From here, hungry, now to dinner, Chinatown, not U-And-Me this time, but the Golden Inn, classic late-night pit stop for the service industry...
It's the Mos Eisley of dining out...
Every despicable member of every notorious nationality is here. Every visible minority without declarable means of support, income, or otherwise justifiable existence have found outlet for their late night hunger...there are beautiful girls of every nationality and suspect morality, their pimps and clients, there are the innocents who've strayed after one too many (and nobody here can walk a straight line), there are the dealers and gangstas, the late-night Casanovas and their expensive prey, the too-fashionable nightclubbers, the cocaine vampires who never sleep and seldom eat, this, this is service hell...
The waiter, he doesn't take this shit, a larger Asian, he ignores the snapping fingers, gestures, he's got it down. They've their own mafia, and while it isn't as slick as John Wick be sure that if you cross them they'll fuck you up. We order, watch the show, the innocent late-night-after-the-club-drunkards, the "business people", the shitheads and dickheads and think to ourselves that we've got it easy...
We do. No kidding, we work in hell, but compared to this we're in paradise...
Dinner comes, we eat, watch, eat, pay, tip, well, we're not tipping for just ourselves, but for the probabilities of a decent tip off of all the tables surrounding us, for the assholes and whores that surround us that in all probability won't be leaving a dime, our tip, it's our apology for our tardiness, for humanity, fucking bloody hell...
Page 726 of 1083