Hard Times

Hard Times

So, get this right? My mate Jay and I are walking. Slow like. He’s going on about how he dealt with some fool who tried him. And I’m telling him about the bird I got with last night. Real fine she was. And then—

BAM!

I’m on the floor. I can taste my own blood. Here’s this little dude. He’s kicking me. Ow! That really hurts! He’s pulling my J’s off!

I say, “what the fuck, man?”

He goes, “fuck you,” so I go, “no, fuck you.”

He kicks me in the nuts.

Those were real nice kicks, man. My ma got ‘em for me. I had to ask her like “Yo ma, I need new 1s.” And she was like, “no,” and I was like, “please ma, I gotta look nice for the ladies,” and she was like, “okay, sweetie.”

Now, where’s Jay? Little shit ran away! And we’ve known each other since we were nine. Here I am lying in an alley between Ninth and Hardwood with no shoes. So, I get up, right, and I am like, shit! Gotta go to a hospital. So, I walk over to this massage parlor with a clinic in the back, and I say, “doc, I’m bleeding out!” So, he pushes out this chair, puts on some rock ‘n’ roll, and he pulls out my tooth.

I am like, “what the fuck?

He is like, “cavities, man.”

I am like, “fuck you, that’s my tooth!”

He fucking sprays me.

I am not even kidding, man. I wake up on a table, right? Everything hurts. Here’s this cross-eyed dude with a cleaver—flike the ones from Home Depot, you know? I am like, “what’s going on?” He is like, “we are taking out your kidneys.” I am like, “no, I need my kidneys!” Like those are important, man.

So I say, “fuck you,” he says, “fuck you,” I say no, “f-u-c-k you.”

So here I am, I got no shoes, no teeth, no kidneys, and I need a cab ride back to my ma.

Spot me a twenty?

ARTICLEend

About the Author

Vinayak Das Gupta lives in Delhi NCR, where he teaches and writes. You can find him on Twitter @vinayakdasgupta and on Instagram @bilusaurus.

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Photo by Aleksandr Burzinskij: https://www.pexels.com/photo/faceless-black-person-demonstrating-middle-finger-4834515/-