helmut schpitz
Me and Jersey Girl finished off the rest of the mushrooms last night. We had a little help from Helmut Schpitz, the local German, nihilist landscaper.
Helmut was already ranting and railing against the government and George Bush and republicans when he walked in my front door, asking me if I knew how many people had been blown up in Iraq so far. I was about to make a guess, but Helmut answered for me and kept ranting.
We offered Helmut some cold mushroom juice and he took it, mixed it with some gatorade and guzzled it down. Then we went and got more tequila to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.
We asked Helmut if he would like to have some dinner with us, but he declined, saying he had just had a big dinner at the oyster bar. But when we put a baked potato in front of Helmut, he took it in one hand and swallowed it instantly.
Then he told us about the time he got thrown in the LA County jail for three weeks for some sort of traffic thing. It was two days before Christmas in 1984, and there were no judges available to have hearings or set bail, so Helmut had to spend all that time in jail. That's when he learned to eat potatoes so fast.
After dinner, me and Jersey girl had some mushrooms too. For a while we were just sitting on the couch listening to house music, and listening to Helmut rant and rail. My leg was bouncing up and down to the beat. Sometimes Jersey Girl would go out on the front porch and smoke and dance. (As far as we know, we're the only people on our street who dance on the front porch).
After Helmut looked over a Picasso book, he had a sudden urge to paint something on my dining room wall. (This isn't as unusual as it sounds since one side of the room is already splashed with paint and lines and stuff). I found Helmut a paint brush and a couple of colors, and he started painting on the wall.
It was pretty quiet and peaceful while Helmut painted on the wall. He was very serious, and deliberate and focused with his brush, and he didn't rant or rail. I had this feeling that Helmut is probably destined to be a painter, since he has to do something with all of that ranting energy, and hatred of the government and the mass media.
Before too long, Helmut had painted two crisp, but amorphous shapes on the wall. One shape was blue and looked vaguely like a spitting phallus. The other shape was a fleshy colored and kind of buxom and feminine. I gave Helmut a magic marker to sign his name, but the ink nib was almost gone, and he could only write H? before it died. Then he put 5-5-5.
After he was done painting, Helmut got kind of loud and boisterous again. At one point me and Jersey Girl were sitting out on the porch by our chunk of bricks that we had stolen from Savannah. Helmut came up and knocked the bricks off the porch, and then he kicked the bricks a good four feet with his work boot.
I started to get kind of worried that Helmut was going to freak out some of the neighbors. He started shouting at my wooden bench and telling me I never listened to him, just like a wooden bench. Then he told us this great story about how he got the necklace he was wearing, several years ago while tripping on acid. When he first started peaking on the acid he felt like he was driving a cartoon car with cartoon wheels, etc. He really made you see and feel the cartoon cars of his acid trip in his story. Then when he got to this fashion show he was modeling in, all of the female models looked lide giant insects. Helmut was kind of going nuts in a cromagnon man sort of way, so one of the fashion desginers wove him a steel necklace right before his eyes to calm him down.
Finally, Helmut decided to go and meet up with friends elsewhere. I let out and long sigh and things got very quiet. Then me and Jersey girl poured more margaritas and ate more mushrooms. We sat in the darkness on my bed and drank margaritas and ate mushrooms until four o'clock in the morning until all the margaritas and all the mushrooms were gone.
It was weird. I felt sort of mexican.
9:03:13 PM 
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