The 24th Fire: A Tale of Fading
Cheese
Cheese turned the corner going 85 mph through the crowded ghetto neighborhood. Spotting his final destination, he pulled up hard on the emergency brake to stop his vehicle.
He was late. He was always late.
Getting out of his ‘85 AMC Gremlin, his .22 pistol fell out of his lap and on the ground. His Taurus “pistol pete”, as he loving called it, always had the hammer cocked.
You couldn’t waste precious milliseconds doing something stupid like moving your thumb. The young children of the ghetto loved robbing pizza drivers and his pale-ass stood out like the Pillsbury doughboy at the million man march.
His preparedness, something he held true to since his 2-month tenure as a boy scout, cost him this time. The hammer fell and a .22 round flew out of his gun and through a window, glass landing harmlessly at the feet of an old lady.
“Watch where you shoot that thing, you fucking degenerate Warhammer fan,” She yelled, waving her cane in the air to stress her seriousness.
He did not need this. Now he only had one more bullet and he had to make it the rest of the month without the misguided youth of the inner-city beating him and stealing his tip money.
Cheese bent over, pulling his sweatpants up to save his imploded ass cheeks from falling out of his gray sweatpants. His boss told him he couldn’t wear those sweats while working anymore, the complaints and refunds were getting to be too much. But he didn’t fit into the company pants anymore. These sweats were all that he could wear.
He waved the gun in the air, not like the old lady, but like a goofy fuck who wants everyone to know that he was the goofy fuck who fired a round off in a crowded ghetto neighborhood.
“Sorry”, Cheese yelled out with the sincerity and humbleness off a man who needed to keep his job.
He placed the gun under his left tit, its fatty and bulbous shape was more than enough to keep his gun in place. Better than his lap did anyways. As the hot steel barrel warmed his inner nipple, he worried about having one less shot at surviving tonight.
As he stepped up to the apartment complex, children were running around with sharpened sticks and throwing rocks at dumpsters and cars, babies crawling around, drinking Arizona iced tea and eating skittles.
“Typical peoples of an misrepresented and marginalized racial group” he muttered.
He looked at the address printed on the Domino’s receipt for the 20th time. It read, “FO FO HUNDETH MARTIN LUTHER KING JUNIOR BOULEVARD, PARTMENT FITTY FO.”
The computer took the order and would print out the addresses phonetically. It had already cost them a few lawsuits.
He looked at the apartment map, lit by a blinking fluorescent. It had handprints of human feces all over it, blocking his view to the location of his pizza target.
Cheese had delivered to this complex before. In fact, it had just been taken off the no-go list after it’s six-month probationary period. This Domino’s had figured out how to work in terms its customers could understand.
He looked and saw that the complex on his right ended in 53, and the complex on his left started with 55. Groaning like a little bitch, he set towards 53, 54 surely being close by.
Well, “Shirley” was there, a young child, only 23 years of age and weighing about 280 lbs. Being almost 7 foot tall, Shirley was known as the Gentle Giant of the ‘partment complex.
Shirley grabbed the boxes out of Cheese’s hands and said, “What are you going to do about it, pizza boy?”
Cheese thought long and hard about his next sentence. He couldn’t risk trying to shoot a young child of poor economic background this size with his only one round. It would probably take about 5 to 6 bullets to take down a candidate for equal opportunity this big. He had to appeal to this giant’s gentle side.
“That’ll be $24.80, and I only get paid in tips.”
The next thing Cheese remembered was waking up on the warm concrete, next to his car. All he had on was his gray sweats. Shirley had taken everything from his person, even pistol pete from up under his man-tit.
He groaned in humiliation as he got in his car, turned the screwdriver that was jammed in the ignition, and started driving with only three of the four pistons firing. It wouldn’t be long before he couldn’t even do this, deliver pizzas and get robbed.
He drove home. He could tell his boss why he fucked up again in the morning.
Returning to his house, he plopped down on his worn, second-hand recliner and turned on the TV. A booming male announcer voice came out.
“The Garbage Man has become the first writer to win a Pulitzer, along with every other prize in publication history! What a truly amazing auth-”
He quickly turned the TV back off. “Fuck you, Garbage Man”, he muttered and took a swig off his cheap whiskey, the kind they sell at CVS in big, burly plastic jugs.
“Daddy, daddy!” came the pip-squeak squeal of his little girl as she bounded off the floor and into his lap.
“Did you bring any pizza home tonight, dad?” She looked up at him with a twinkle of innocence mixed with the manipulation skills of a five year-old.
“Nope”, he said sternly. “I ate it all.”
“Daaaaaad” she cried out in disappointment. Dad always brought home pizza from work.
“Ho, ho, ho, child! You know your father is just joshing with ya!”
Cheese pulled out a piece of pepperoni from the pocket of his gray sweatpants, a piece he had snagged off a dozen pizza order.
He lovingly picked off a piece of gray lint and handed the slice to his daughter. She gave him a big hug and took the piece and ate it with the ravenous hunger of a starving muskrat.
“Whoa, whoa, slow down there my child, you must allow the nutrition to enter your muscles, so you can be a big-shot body-builder, like your ol’ man used to be!”
Cheese then proudly flexed his arms over his head, the fat flopping around the bottom of his arms, like dripping cottage cheese that won’t fall off.
“Eww, dad, not while I’m eating” She said with her mouth full.
“Child, when your ol’ man was at top of his game, I was the biggest guy in my whole group of friends. Cheese, they called me.”
“Why did they call you Cheese, dad?”
“Ho, ho, ho! I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Cheese laughed again and gave his daughter a playful pat on top of her head. “Now go run off, your dad has got some work to do.”
“Okay dad, I love you.” She then blew him a kiss and ran off back to her room.
“And I love you, my little Masha.” He grabbed her air kiss put it in his sweat pocket.
Swigging the last drop of his whiskey, he pulled out and then turned on his laptop. He highlighted the “Thursday Night Tales” folder and opened it. It was still empty, save for one document. The one he wrote all those years ago. The one he wrote about his mortal enemy:
The Garbage Man.
He reread it, shuddering at some his amateur grammatical mistakes, but still found it to be at least readable and somewhat imaginative. It was along the lines of a homo-erotic fan-fiction set in Sons of Anarchy. That’s the way Cheese liked it.
I used to be someone of stature, someone respected for his size and his intelligence, Cheese thought to himself.
“Yeah, you used to be a lot of things. What are you now?” He muttered out loud.
With a heavy, defeated sigh, Cheese opened a fresh document, and began to type...
