He tossed a knife at a young child’s head but the handle was the only thing to connect and the child lost an eye anyway. This is the first thing he tells me when I meet him, not the half-blind child but the knife-thrower. We were outcast agents hiding in the Frontier and constructing long documents reporting our activities and those around us. Caged heat chained dogs in basketball game set ups, little children going down pointless slides into snapping jaw dark angel demon dogs, always running down back alleys that lead sideways into main roads where there are no cars because gasoline doesn’t last on the Frontier. He offered his hand and I saw the tattoos, and he started going into a great rap about the evolution of the universe through time.

“Guy with a chicken sits on a power line,” he’s telling me. “Stasis, full hibernation. Chicken turns around and lays an egg. Goes down from the power line perch, scrambles on the sidewalk. Saw it on the news, whole angry crowds lashing teeth, snapping fingers in time.”

We go down to a racetrack and he places large bets explaining that his luck is in and he has to ride the streak out. He’s got the whole gambling profession worked into a scientific method and dotes over my small wagers.
“You’re not playing big,” he tells me. “Take that Grace in the eighth, she’s a 4 to 1 and you’ve only laid out 145 pietas, not even a round number. Round numbers are an indication of faith in gambling, Christ, man, look at that fag there!” and he points to a passing transvestite and starts going into a rap on that. “Fag like that comes into the joint one time, most elegant fag you’ve ever seen, two bits of tar hidden in a fake tooth. Well, the boys have a field day with this fag, he dies after drinking so much, it was like bukkake.

“Now let me tell you something about the Japanese art of bukkake, I tell ya what. Japanese know a thing or two about humiliation and they’ve made it into an artform, just like they did for suicide. Hari kari, seppu ku, whatever you want to call it, amounts to the same thing: preserving honor.

“Now that we’ve established how important honor is, see foregoing discussion about suicide, then we know that humiliation is a revolutionary concept in such a society. We got in the joint, right now, ten million people that are humiliating or being humiliated, right? Big fish eat the little one, dangerous angels of questionable virtue, as they say upper class style, which leads me back to my point about revolution.

“In which we determine a way to see if the emperor has clothes, am I right? Now you talk about humiliation, you best rise up off the ground for that, accept it as institutionalized discrimination to not degrade yourself. But my exit visa’s been running out, that’s what I meant to tell you, and I’m thinking about staying here in Eberhart.”
He’s asking me for a place to stay.
“Look at them go, god damn it!” he interrupts his own patter. “That one out front is a grotesque monster, seen a fellow like him in the joint. Stands up in the lunch room and shits on his food, just like that. That one in the front, looks like he’s got the same potential.”
The one in front is an Arab with an angry look and he’s viciously swinging his arms to keep back the people beside him, one of which is a white supremacist with many tattoos. A teenage girl is making great progress secretly on the outside, covering a lot of ground. The penis continues it’s path around the track, throwing up dirt behind it, showering the racers with debris, broken needles and medical waste that’s saturated into the ground, bits of stray metal and coins that have been dropped.

This is essentially a cash environment and outside cash is suspect so most people drop any foreign change they get because it’s worthless. Nobody knows where to exchange the money from the outside world.

And my companion is now back on me, urging, “That fag’s following me now, I can tell. He’s been in the joint and he knows a guy that I once shanked. Got a shiv in my boot’s heel, how you see nothing there but there’s only nothing unless you search. Isn’t that always the way? But as I was saying about this fag, he's using ankle-grabbing for protection. Damn soap was glued to the floor in the shower. Well his patriarch figure, he’s out running up debts he can’t pay off. Now this little fag doesn’t know what to do, all fags are essentially not equipped for survival on their own, which is one of the reasons they fight for gay marriage.

“So this fag’s rich businessman boyfriend has a problem he doesn’t want to tell the fag, Jewish mother if I ever saw one, so he racks up this debt and he robs a store, some bodega on some corner, doing the fucking gook bastard a service by getting him that insurance money. So when the police come and ask who did it, guy’s left his calling card whatever that was, led them straight to the place, this little fag jumps up and says, ‘It was me! I did it!’ Yeah, just like that he takes a bullet, as all fags should do at some point.

“Or maybe that was all wrong and his fag-support just went and did some insider trading and linked it back to his bitch fag. That fag there was in the joint and now he’s out here, that’s not a fucking coincidence. That’s what you have to be careful of. Life has no coincidences, life is a series of random events that you have to try to negotiate.

“Well that fag becomes a prag to some big bull queer that everyone’s too chickenshit to say anything to but me. Told him? Fucking hell, I took him right down the road. He’s stolen something from my friend and is holding him ransom so my friend goes back to him and says that’s contraband and the bull queer’s got to start paying some protection or my friend is going to the hacks. Well a hack’s a square man unless something’s offered, in my experience, in which case they curve like a streamer on 4th of July.

“And what’s this big bull queer do? He doesn’t lift a finger, he just calls on his guys and they go down and drag my friend up to the roof. Can he fly, they all wanna know. Well no, he can’t fly, not with his arm broken like that, so they just throw him off the roof. Screws let them up there and watched it happen and don’t even bother helping the guy. They left him there for four hours until shift change and then a new team of crooked squares comes in and they scoop him up and take him down the infirmary and there’s nothing they can do for him after four hours, off the roof onto concrete and in the sun. Birds picking at him, bugs crawling on him.

“Well I says to my other friend, I says to him, ‘That big bull’s behind this shit and he’s about to get his neck broke.’ My other friend just leaves, slips away, which means I’m doing this on my own. But first I see that fag in front of me, this distressingly open fag, so I tell him that I’m gonna get his big bull queer through the screws so the rumor’s out there. Well the fag runs back and sings his fag heart out and that’s perfect for my gig because now the bull’s asking the guards for protection. Well you ask the guards for protection and you think you’re safe, that’s what I wanted from this guy.

“So I catch him getting a blowjob from the fag in a storage shed, guy told where they were and all. So I walk up behind him all quiet-like and just stick that shiv from my boot straight up his asshole. Right into the prostate, then I rip upwards and cut out his digestive system’s end track. The fag, he tells me after it’s done, he says, ‘You stabbing him made him cum in my mouth and it tasted like blood.’ Sure as that, yes sir, that’s the same fag. Well he’s gonna suck my dick next is what he’s gonna do because he’s followed me this far.”
“Well there’s only one thing to do,” I suggest.
“That’s right,” my companion agrees. “He’ll have to go next. Well I must be going as it’s past some people’s bedtimes, which means a lot of things are unguarded. Thanks for offering to let me stay with you, it’s very kind. I’ll let you know if I’m staying here, now that the fag situation has been sorted out. God damn, follows me this far and then makes his move at the racetrack. It couldn’t be like that if it were a book. Nobody would write a story about this.”