Category: Tag pages

It was a semi-truck, an eighteen-wheeler, a big sucker. The driver was prolly lonely as anything, he just want some company for awhile and don’t care if Wojo looks like a shattered stained-glass portrait of a man. Wojo briefly worked as a trucker, he knows about the way o’ the road. It is a lonely life, solitarious if that’s a word, it prolly ain’t, but it sounds righter than lonely. There’s folks driving all around, truck stops is crowded with anonymous faces and interchangeable waitresses like engine parts, the beardy man’s eyes was green like burning traffic lights, go, go, go, and maybe he oughta be a trucker again. If being married to Pam got to be too much he could do it, he’d be gone all the time, she could spend money on curtains and throw pillows, green means go go go.
The electric shock got his brain wobbly still. He don’t wanna be a trucker. Too lonesome.
Or maybe that’s how life comes: lonesome. Only truckers got the gumption to not gussy up the raging lonelies with a home.

From Wojo the Action Hero

The door open, and Hassle came storming into the jailhouse, wrinkling his nose. “Fuckin’ kids!”
“Sup, Hassle.”
Hassle stopped short. “Wojo.” He looked back the way he came, where a forlorn young black kid came sauntering in. Hassle scowled. “That punk-ass kid dunno how to mop-“
“I don’t needta mop! And I ain’t a kid, I’s almost twenty!” said the punk-ass kid.
“Hmm-hmm…” Wojo was feeling too calm to give a shit. He was not currently giving a shit about anything other than Tommy and Pam, and he was stuck in jail, so he was not currently giving a shit about them.
Essentially, Hassle and the young black man were supposed to be cleaning. Hassle had different standards for how that should be done compared to the young black man, whose standards were that it shouldn’t be done. Hassle was very particular about the floor being mopped correctly, cuz he was like that. The young black men — and young men in general — did not care about this at all. It was an irreconcilable difference between the two of them, and it caused them no end of consternation. It caused Wojo none. He was not currently giving a shit about mopping.

From Wojo the Action Hero

He did want to see some action though, as the last couple months had been boring. They were on a military outreach campaign, a “hearts and minds” thing. That meant they were sposedta mingle with the locals in Muscat. Wojo wasn’t never much of a mingler though. Oughta use women for that, women can mingle. Pam’d be good at it.
But Omanis was like mad anti-woman, like they’d never mingle with a female. They’d prolly grope her, they’re like that.
They got a taxi ride into Muscat and took in a coffee in the local cafe. The Middle-East got mad good coffee, bet! Cuz they don’t drink alcohol, prolly, maybe, coffee is the only fun drink they got. And tea. But Wojo don’t mess with tea.
He smiled at everyone they met, and all of ’em looked back with suspicion but then acted friendly. Oman was an American ally, but the Omanis were not, if that makes sense. The country versus the people. Arabs don’t smile at strangers. Wojo don’t know enough to know he shouldn’t be smiling at Arabs. Tommy did, he knew about that stuff, he picked it up like a sixth sense. If he tanned hisself, grew a beard and got a perm, he could pass for Omani, prolly, definitely. Tommy did do exactly that later on.
He sat there like a tumor while Tommy and the shepherdy Omani gabbed along, and then, before Wojo knew it, he was heading into the steam baths of Muscat and the shepherdy one was already undressing before they even got in there. Mad back hair! Wojo don’t wanna judge the Omani culture, but they got too much body hair! Wojo do get his chest hair growing over his shoulder onto his back sometimes, but he gets his neighbor Avery to shave it, it’s called civilization, shit!

From Wojo the Action Hero

They was on the way to visit her family, so it must have something to do with them, Wojo thunk. Her mama is nice. They’s from Vermont, and they own a dairy. It’s big, real pretty, like a lotta green, yu’know, fields and barns and stuff, they do cows, couple goats too, they say goat milk is real valuable, they makes cheese outta it. People pay more for goat cheese than cow cheese. Wojo tried goat milk cheese before in Europe, it’s salty and kinda hard to eat, but it’s good in a way. Tastes like spilled white wine on cream cheese.

From Wojo the Action Hero

You know there’s different kinda curtains? Bunchesa kinds. Wojo just had them blackout curtains. The only purpose to a curtain was to black out the light, right? So the best curtain must block out all the light. Henceforth, blackout curtains. Forget about it! Pam got other ideas. She got lotsa ideas about curtains. She like different colors and fabrics and some got like belts and sashes and stuff, like a beauty pageant. They was all less effective — and therefore worse, as Wojo saw it — than the plain gray blackout curtains he already had.
Unless you get more windows, why would you ever buy new curtains? They don’t go bad! Bet!

From Wojo the Action Hero

Truck very much disliked hairy honkies. White men oughta shave. A little chest hair is fine, but any more than a classy treasure trail was barbarism. White men oughta know better.
Italians do not know better, however. Not knowing better is what it means to be Italian. Truck did not like Italians.

From The Reluctant Thug

“I wanted to show you something and see what you thought-” Rob busied himself with opening his briefcase. It was only two latches, but he wanted to make Mr. Maltley wait, so he pretended to have trouble with it. “Ah, there we go.” He lifted up a beautiful ornate cookie jar and placed it in his lap. It was a panda bear, arms and legs wrapped around a bee whose body was the actual jar. Its insectoid eyes were the lid, giving it an sinister vibe that was counteracted by the jolly bear with its amygdaliformic eyes.
Up until this moment, Rob had thought of the jar as just a tool to get what he wanted out of Mr. Maltley. It didn’t even occur to him to wonder why a cookie jar might be important or valuable or that it might really have an artistic statement. Once he pulled it out of the briefcase, however, he briefly saw it in the same light that Mr. Maltley did, and it made him feel flush with fear, disgust, comfort, humor, hunger, warmth, cold, all at once. It hummed and buzzed and rolled and frolicked, and when he touched it, Rob was struck with sunny warmth and the comfort of a hug, and the smell — no, not the smell, the feel, the vibe — of fresh-baked cookies wafted through his senses. The cookie jar brought him back to a childhood he’d never had, and for a moment that his mind constructed into an eternity, Rob saw the passage of his life, but not his actual life, his life if he had been born to the kind of mother who baked cookies and put them in a jar like this. He saw flashes of himself as a child, helping her cook, sneaking cookies, baking them for her for Mother’s Day, binging on them in his teenage years, eschewing them as baby-stuff, receiving the jar as a gift and filling them with his own cookies to dole out to the children this imaginary Rob presumably had, just out of sight.
He was almost reluctant to give it up. But that was the only reason he bought it, the only reason he brought it here. Of course he was going to give it up.
“It doesn’t need to be gorgeous. You don’t understand. A cookie jar is not just a place to store cookies. It is a living, breathing piece of art, a piece of childhood set in a fixed form. It is more than you can dream of, little man,” Mr. Maltley said.

From The Cookie Jar Collector

The men were skinny prettyboys who weren’t pretty, a milquetoast collection of duds, sour-faced and scrawny like petrified herring. Oh, there were hot Swedettes a plenty: blondes with blue eyes and alluring grins, Saami babes with thickness in all the right spots, even a bubbling squadron of ladies who had filled up the Pressbyrån convenience store that Rob was trying to get gas in at the time — they carried hockey sticks and other gear which Rob later discovered was technically for a sport called bandy, which was hockey using a ball instead of a puck.
Sweden was a drab green, cloudy, full of emotionless skinny men who made Rob’s dick shrivel up at the sight of them. They all appeared to be sucking on a lemon, Rob thought, but that couldn’t be true because there were no lemons here — that would have been too much flavor for Swedish cuisine. This was a country of heavy, dull carbs with the taste cooked out of them. Here, porridge had been the most delightful thing Rob had yet eaten. It tasted of nothing, which was a step up from other Swedish food.

From The Swede