Shake Hands with Beef [NSFW]

[TonyTwoFingers]

Hello everyone,

So I'm starting this new series as something kind of independent from Missing Stars. I will continue writing Rainy Mornings, but back and forth between that and this new series. Update one, then the other, and so on.

Quick note about this new series, it has both strong language and objectionable content. Both in healthy supply, too. So if that's not your jam, you've been warned.

Also, the condition depicted in this series is totally fictitious with no basis in reality. Any similarities between it and real conditions or situations is coincidental. Please do not attempt to draw connections between the main character's condition and any actually existing condition. You will fail.

That's it for disclaimers. Enjoy!
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Let me begin by establishing right off the bat, that I am an unhealthy man. Not sucking down three Big Macs with a Mountain Dew chaser unhealthy, either. I’m the sort of unhealthy that people move out of the neighborhood to avoid. I’ve been called sick. Twisted. Demented. Mentally deranged, I think, was the agreed-on term.

Now, mind you, I’m not exactly painting Picassos with my shit - but the man three cells down is. He’s getting pretty good, too. Just the other day, he was showing me how to shade. At least he was, before the aides came and hit him so hard his relatives could feel it. Poor Johnny. Poor me, too. Just for being with him, I got no dinner that night - and I LOVE baked potato night.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “This man ought to be ashamed. I know many people with mental disorders, and they don’t act like this monster!” Well, let me tell you, you unequaled strider of the earth, you. You have never, ever, met anyone like me. The shrinks in their labcoats say I have a mental disorder because they don’t know what else to call it. So, in a way, you’re right. I have no mental disorder. At least not one that DSM-VI can point a finger at.

So until they figure out what to do with me, I’m stuck here with my thoughts, two dozen of my closest friends, a world-class staff, and you. And, make no mistake, I’m only talking to you because Freud up in the head office wants me to. Tells me it might be therapeutic. Could be, for all I know. Frankly, I’m kind of interested myself, to see how all of this turns out. So what I want you to do is sit back, prop your feet up, and listen, because I’m only going through this shit once.


I remember my senior year of high school fondly. I had a steady job, I had a pretty good circle of friends, and the girls of my class had just about fully developed. Up until that year, I was pretty stable. Maybe a few isolated incidents here and there, but nothing that a lot of other people haven’t done. Maybe every once and a while, a neighborhood cat got tagged by a rogue BB - or maybe there was an unusually high amount of roadkill that month. But it lacked originality, and I never got any recognition for it. Hell, at the time, it seemed like “getting away with something,” rather than not getting credit. No showmanship.

But when I really came into my own was when I got a job at a local grease-slinging joint. The cantankerous old bastard that ran the place didn’t care much for the cut of my jib, so when closing time came, I was always the guy who had to run the french fry oil out to the grease dumpster. Now, this was a big-ass grease dumpster. Maybe north of 400 gallons of the stuff would fit in there before it had to get drained. Problem was, it was older than dust, and sprung leaks every now and then. One thing leads to another, and after a few days you’ve got maggot-Manhattan. And I mean Manhattan. There must’ve been a circle of maggots three-feet wide around the dumpster, meaning in order to do my job, I had to walk across three feet of the bastards, although I could just pull a Good King Wenceslas on the way back.

So every night, five nights a week, I would scrape a thin layer of fly babies off my shoes before going back inside to lock up. The first few times it felt kinda nasty, but I got used to it quick enough. Hell, one time, I showed a coworker my best Gene Kelly impression - and you have not lived until you’ve heard my rendition of “Singin’ in the Maggots”. My coworker gets a big kick out of it, and eventually, word gets back around to the crotchety old man. Now, unfortunately for me, it seems like he’s a big Gene Kelly fan, because he was not happy when word of my little dance number got around.

So, one Friday night, after handing out everyone’s decidedly menial paycheck, the old bastard calls me into the rear office. At this point all of my coworkers ditch me to go get hammered in the woods, and I’m bummed because I want to join them. This rear office is absolutely plastered with the old bastard’s past life. Polaroid photos of him back in the war, about a baker’s dozen of mounted buck heads, and a display cabinet loaded up with shitty artwork sent to him by his estranged grandchildren. I’m ready to get royally chewed out, probably fired, when he stands up out of his chair, and swings his left hand up into my junk, and holds there. At this point, I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Stranger danger videos were kind of vague about what to do when your boss grabs your sack without warning. So for a few seconds, we just stare at each other - me out of confusion, him out of some sick fetish or whatever.

All of a sudden, the old guy starts misting up. My mind is going about a million miles a minute, worried that he has some sick sex toy he calls “The Widow Maker” stashed in his desk. Luckily, he just starts goddamn sobbing. He takes the kung-fu grip off my man-parts only to start rummaging around his own junk, before pulling out some old service pistol. He starts blabbering about how he’s got like, terabytes of CP stashed in a bunch of flash drives scattered around the restaurant. I’m still too confused to know what the hell is happening - my balls are still tingling from where he had sack-tapped me. So he monologues for a little bit about how the cops were closing in on him, how he was gonna rot in jail, yadda yadda yadda. So before I can get a firm grip on what the fuck is going on, the crazy old bastard repaints that lovely display cabinet with his frontal lobe. I freak out at the sudden noise and the subsequent silence, but get a grip a few seconds later. Reality finally starts sinking in, and I realize that I’m in a world of hurt. This dead asshole in front of me has left me in a room with his soon-to-be-stinking corpse, after giving me what my coworkers assumed to be a good yelling-at. I’m murder suspect number one. So, I figure I’ve got to make this look like what it is. I sit him up in his office chair, making sure that the bullet trajectory would still match up with the bloodstain. I find one of his flash drives tucked behind one of his grandchildren’s paintings, and load it up on his laptop. I open up one of the images, place the laptop in front of him, and position the old bastard’s other hand down his pants.

But I’m no fool, see. Tampering with a crime scene is a crime in and of itself. And they can take fingerprints off anything these days, even skin. So now I’m nervous they’ll lift my prints off my dead boss. But, where there’s a will, there’s a way. The way I saw it, those maggots owed me a favor after making me wade through them so many times. So before I left that hole for the last time, I took two handfuls of maggots and dumped them on that poor old bastard’s lap.

When Monday came, there was barely anything left. It felt a little weird cashing that paycheck, but still. At least I made it out in time to drink with my coworkers.

[Snuffkin]

Now that's what I call a Mcdonald triad! *bad-dum-tish*

[scopedknife]

Write more.

[TonyTwoFingers]

Greetings Space-cadets,

Your official objective, straight from mission control, is to read section two of Shake Hands with Beef.

Above disclaimers still apply.

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So, for a while, I’m a little short on dosh. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but during your senior year, cash is king. I mean, think of your average gold digger. Now multiply that by a hundred. That’s your average high school female. You could take the biggest loser in school - I mean the type of kid that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down - and line his pockets? He’s knee-deep in it overnight.

Take my old friend Paul. Now Paul wasn’t exactly a bad looking guy from the start, and even occasionally had a nice piece of arm candy he would parade around the school like she was some sort of Lady Godiva until the two tragically, yet predictably, broke it off anywhere from two-to-three weeks later. So, one night, Paul calls me up on the phone. Breathing all heavy and shit like he’d just finished a three-hour masturbate-a-thon. Practically starts telling me he had a divine revelation, courtesy of Jesus Christ himself, before he finally spills the beans: women dig money.

Now, it’s a good thing that Paul came from a rich family, because that dumbass couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a map. I couldn’t believe he had just figured out one of the simplest dynamics of gender relations. But I don’t goad him or anything, I just lead him along. I start pretending like he’s a goddamn Nobel Laureate. So I let Paul talk until sweetums gets tuckered out from all his excitement. Sure thing, next morning, Paul rolls into school in his father’s Jaguar.

Stick with me for a sec, because here’s where shit gets a little “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. See, like I said, Paul comes from a comfortable lifestyle. Problem is, like all too many rich kids, he has a bad relationship with his dad. Boo-hoo. Anyways, Paul’s dad has a total hard-on for this Jaguar. Loves it more than the sun in the sky. As such, Paul is not allowed to be in the same room as the car, let alone drive it. Lucky for Paul, his dad’s rarely home, always away doing something for business and only comes home on the weekends. Don’t buy that movie bullshit where people memorize the exact number of miles on their car: I’m crazy and I don’t do that. So Paul’s in tall cotton. He’s got looks, a pimped-out ride, and a weekly allowance that could feed a Sudanese family for three months.

He gets away with it for a while. All year long, Paul keeps calling me up to tell me what girl he just bedded in the back of the Jag. I humor him because, I’m not gonna lie, I’m kinda hoping he’ll let me drive the sucker at some point. So Paul’s midnight trysts and twilight romances go on for a few months, and I somehow wind up becoming his go-to kiss-and-tell confidant.

Now’s a good time to introduce Deanna Markowitz. Now, Deanna’s not a real looker. Hell, she’s what my old man would call a “three-bagger, because if you’re two-bagging her and one bag rips, you’d be so terrified the other would too, you’d lose your boner!” But nobody liked Deanna because of her face - people liked Deanna because of her great stonking pair of tits. I mean Deanna had an ungodly rack that would make the most devout of Jesus-freaks shake hands with the devil. So you may’ve figured out at this point that I kind of had a thing for Deanna Markowitz. And it’s true, but it wasn’t just anything shallow like it was for everyone else. To me, she was this sweet, Southern-belle type that turned my guts to bubble gum and my brain to cotton candy. Killer personality, too - could talk a dog off a meat truck. Plus, the jugs didn’t hurt.

Now, Paul knew I liked Deanna. Hell, I must’ve told him half a million times that I wanted to ask her out to prom. Because you’ve seen movies, you already know where this is going. Paul calls me up one Saturday night, and tells me that he just finger-banged “that Markowitz chick” in the back of daddy’s Jag. So I’m pretty distraught at this point, just imagining this douchebag defiling my woman. But, in the immortal words of Mohandas Gandhi, “don’t get mad, get even.” I go through all of the basic forms of revenge in my head as Paul goes into intimate detail about Deanna’s more private areas. First I think about just beating the shit out of him, but it’s not original enough - and his legal team would make me some con’s shower husband by the end of the week. Then I start thinking about planting drugs in his locker and calling in an anonymous tip. Nobody would question a rich kid getting caught with a gram of Columbian nose candy in his possession. But, I realize that I need revenge on a budget. Plus, there’s always the chance of getting caught with the coke before planting it, and the whole thing would backfire. Then, I have a revelation of my own. I swear to god, an angelic goddamn choir started humming “Amazing Grace” as the plan came together.

Prom night. I don’t bother asking anyone out, because most prom dates don’t list getting even as one of their top ten turn-ons. Paul shows up in the Jaguar, date in tow, just as planned. Now, while my classmates are in the gymnasium, getting buzzed off the spiked punch and getting nasty in the locker rooms, I’m out in the parking lot, decked out in my baby-blue tuxedo, slashing Paul’s tires and keying the shit out of that goddamn Jag. I mean, I carve the bastard up. You could bathe in the paint chips by the time I’m done. And then what do I do? Do I call it quits there? No - remember, this is the same asshole that stuck his grubby hands inside my crush, then seeing fit to tell me all about it. I call up Paul’s dear old dad, pretending to be a concerned neighbor. I lay it on thick - “I think I saw your son go out joyriding in your Jaguar. They were squealing the tires, banging on the doors, it was awful!” I don’t even get to finish my prepared lines before he’s thanked me and hung up. I almost started thanking the Academy.

I head back into the gymnasium, and wait smugly for something, anything, to happen. But it doesn’t. So I’m pissed and kind of disheartened, Paul should be in deep shit right now, but instead, he’s playing tonsil-hockey with some bimbo from the grade below us. Little do I know, good things come to those who wait. The dance comes to a close, and the chaperones herd the few remaining students into the parking lot while they clean up. Now, there’s only a few people in the lot at this point. There’s about two-dozen or so of my classmates, myself, Paul’s bimbo date, the shit-stick himself, and shit-stick Sr.

Now, I wish you could’ve seen Paul’s face - it was like looking at that Edvard Munch piece, but real. I just expect the old man to grab Paul by the ear and lead him away in front of everyone, but it was better than I expected: Paul’s old man takes out a fucking 9 iron out from behind him, and starts beating the everlasting shit out of his kid! The first swing nails Paul right in the cheek, and his face nearly explodes! People start screaming and calling the cops, but Tiger Woods-wannabe is still swinging for the hole! It takes the five-oh ten minutes to get to the scene before hauling off daddy-dearest. Paul lives, but spends the next four months getting facial reconstruction and eating through a straw. I still don’t think there’s ever been a more fitting punishment for someone who wouldn’t shut the hell up. Pretty sure his dad did 12 years in jail before he managed to hang himself with a belt.


I’m getting kind of tired of talking to you right now, and it’s my exercise hour. Be back here tomorrow at the same time, and we’ll see if I feel like chatting. Truth be told, it’s kind of refreshing being able to talk to someone who doesn’t think that the capital of Germany is Germany City.

[jarek56]

Son of a gun. That was haunting.

[Snuffkin]

Haunting? Nah, the better parts of it made me laugh my ass off. Weird grammar in one or two places, but nothing particularly off-putting.

How did he get internet access in prison, though?

[scopedknife]

Write more.