I Got Stinky Feet, Volume One, Open Air Asylum

By Dennis Domrzalski

They would save the wicked from the pious, the rich from the poor, torch the rain forest, confront sleazeballs and die a thousand times over if necessary. Yes, blowhard Dave and his loyal companion Dennis are off one one of the nuttiest adventures of all time: a cross-country motorcycle trip begun from the frozen Midwest on the first day of winter.
What a ride it is!
In Volume One of this epic adventure, these two heroes wage desperate battles against humanity's most despicable enemies: poets, shoe sniffers, newspaper editors, creative writers and people who chew food with their mouths open. And they unravel some of life's deepest mysteries, like why old people walk so slow and why some people don't wear underwear. They meet every crazy imaginable, slaughter deserving idiots, ruin countless lives and wreak physical and emotional havoc on a nationwide scale as they ride through an open air asylum. It can't get any goofier than this. Join us for the continuing adventures of Dennis and Dave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Logan Square Press
• Release date: Apr 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9780981786995

Dennis Domrzalski

Dennis Domrzalski's greatest talent is helping everyone he meets come to grips with their own glaring shortcomings.He's been a reporter, author and editor since 1979. The native Chicagoan began his career at the fabled City News Bureau of Chicago. He now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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Chapter 1

Dumped, Depressed And Aching To Travel

It was to be the greatest trip and adventure ever in the history of ever. No doubt about it. My buddy Dave said so. It would top anything that Moses or Columbus or the astronauts or the apostles or our buddy Frank, who once took a train to Wisconsin, ever did. Every instant of it would be crammed with excitement, danger and adventure. There would be no stopping, no slowing, no boredom, no standing still. Every day would be a tree-bending, window-busting, basement-flooding thunderstorm and hurricane of the mind.

We’d meet every type of person ever born: Geniuses and fools, scoundrels and innocents, the highest of the high and the lowest of the low, those on opposite ends of the human spectrum—honest folk and politicians, earnest toilers and government workers, believers in God and members of organized religions, law-abiding citizens and cops, intelligent beings and college professors, worthwhile human beings and artists, true men and males who wear hats—alcoholics, bums, dope addicts, conmen, swindlers, pimps, whores, liars, cheats, killers, saints, oddballs and screwballs, deadbeats and upbeats; dull and normal people, sickos and wackos and airheads and brainiacs. We’d meet them all.

We’d save the good from the bad, the healthy from the sick and the wicked from the pious, and who knows, we’d probably kill a few people along the way. We’d go everywhere and see everything and do everything, and in the course of it would almost die, God knows how many times.

It would be the greatest adventure of all time. Of all time! And when it ended, if it ever did, we would be heroes. Mobs of people would ask us questions, the world would know our names, and our buddies in the neighborhood would—finally—buy us a drink.

It was happening. Dave Nadolski and I were going to leave our grimy, drug-infested, oppressive, dead-end Chicago neighborhood and take a cross-country motorcycle trip!

I was going to travel!

The magic of those words and of the idea! Whew! Nothing had ever sent my head spinning so and me gasping for lungfuls of hot, humid, polluted city air. Nothing had ever sounded better to me; nothing so good or important or so loaded with the potential to transform me from the thin, shy, sullen brooder I was into the man that I knew I could someday be—rugged, handsome, sexy, self-reliant, funny, fearless and capable of doing carpentry.

Nothing held that potential like that trip; not even the offer of a lifetime job in a hot, dirty factory complete with a thirty-minute lunch break that my dad had made me, nor the thought of someday getting back together with Shirley Kozlowski, a skinny woman who disliked her dad and who dumped me because I couldn’t dance, drank too much and had no idea what to do when it came to the bedroom. How I had dreamed about winning her back from the older, more experienced man with large hands who had gained her confidence and affections. This trip was my chance to break away from the stifling boredom of my neighborhood and drug addict, thieving friends.

So many stagnant, lonely summer afternoons I had sat by myself against the brick wall of the snack shop on the street corner and watched gum and wax stains on the sidewalks re-melt in the hot sun while neighborhood folks shuffled in and out of the businesses on the street—the grocery stores, the cleaners, the bakery, bowling alley and the taverns.

When those people went about their business, it seemed to me that even the stumbling drunks had something to do and somewhere to go. Everyone, I thought, had a purpose or a goal in life; an important job or something meaningful to do or say. There was dynamism out there, and everyone had it but me.

Everywhere around me life was racing by and leaving me behind. Everything around me was water in a stream, racing its way to a factory inlet pipe. I was a rock being passed up by dead fish, mud, empty beer cans and insects.

I longed for a life other than standing around the street corner with my buddies, watching them list, stare blankly at the ground and mumble about the quantity of drugs they had ingested, how high they were, what stellar and worthwhile human beings the people they bought their drugs from were, what strong beings they were for being able to gulp down booze with their dope, and how they were looking forward to the peak of their highs when they would pass out and sleep on the sidewalk for hours.

I dreamed of a life where I could sleep at night instead of having to lie awake listening for the sound of our street-corner pals hammering at the lock that my brother and I had bolted to our basement door in an attempt to keep our stereo, bicycles, our dad’s rusty tools and our ma’s homemade wine from falling into the burglarizing hands of our buddies. I thought that somewhere, there was a life where the first thing people did in the morning when they woke up was to go to the bathroom, not race down to the basement to see whether their stuff had been stolen.

There was some diversion for me. I worked as a produce clerk at a grocery store in a different neighborhood. The job of putting vegetables on display for sale was fun. And working in a different neighborhood provided me a glimpse of a new, hopeful world, or so I thought, until the day a muscle-bound stock boy with huge ears wrapped his sausage-like fingers around my neck, lifted me off the floor, squeezed until I passed out, and then, when I came to, held a knife to my face and threatened to cut off my ear because I had mistaken him for his older brother.

A piece of me realized that not all of the time spent in the neighborhood was wasted. I knew that all of life needed to be experienced and embraced. But sitting around the street corner throwing rocks and howling juvenile insults at a young, retarded woman who pushed an empty baby buggy around the block, wasn’t exactly the way I wanted to go.

Trying to figure out which one of my buddies would be the next to die of a drug overdose kept me occupied, I’ll admit. But because many of them did die, the game became less challenging and less fun because there were fewer friends left to speculate about. And standing around the corner in the middle of the afternoon watching friends vomit up huge chunks of undigested pizza cheese made me hope that there was more to life than that.

And the way to get out was to travel.

Travel!

My god. The idea was so incredible. The idea crashed around my head and set me to daydreaming and looking at pictures of distant lands and daydreaming some more and planning trips. It took me away, always, so far away, from my

Hanging Out on the Corner

steamy, sooty neighborhood; so far away from the monotonous, earth-shaking thuds from the half-block long metal stamping factories; the acidic, metallic smell from the solder factory; the nose-burning fumes from the electric motor factory; the ammonia fumes from the foundries; the melting rubber odor from the tire factory; and a lonely existence that I considered one of the most miserable in history.

Travel!

It had been my idea of getting out of the neighborhood since a few years back when Dave returned to the neighborhood from a trip he had taken one summer on a Harley Davidson motorcycle to California. He was one big, idiotic grin and an endless source of stories that gushed out of him like warm beer from a shaken can. They were wide-eyed wondrous tales of the close calls he had experienced; of the thousands of odd characters he had met, the friends he had made, the huge numbers of foes he had vanquished, the strange and wonderful worlds he had seen; of how everybody he met came to say how smart he was and how much better he was because he had had the imagination and sense of reckless daring to have taken the trip.

There were stories of how for twenty-four hours straight on the highway he outraced a motorcycle gang who wanted to smash his bike into tiny pieces and bite his ears off because he had insulted them by doubting their boasts that they stunk worse than dead, decaying skunks.

We heard about the chase and about how Dave threw a first-grade reading text at the killers, and how he gained on them while they spent several hours trying to figure out what it said; how he siphoned gas from moving cars on the highway into his bike’s gas tank because he didn’t have time, what with the killers gaining on him, to stop at gas stations; how one motorist he got fuel from refused to let him pass until he had paid the state’s sales tax on the four gallons he had bought; how, when his bike was out of gas and sputtering to a stop, and the murderous thugs were groping for his ears, he popped open the gas tank, sat on top of it and farted into it, and how his body gas propelled that bike and him like a rocket and out of the clutches of the villains; how, when his bike and his body were finally out of gas, he hopped off and started pushing the bike, and how, because he was such a great athlete and former track star, he was actually able to go faster pushing the machine than he was when riding it; how he temporarily gave the assassins the slip by painting a long, cardboard box white, putting it over his head and pretending that he was a giant bar of soap; and how, when the bikers finally cornered him in an abandoned barn, he drove them away in fear and humiliation when he made them believe that he was an evil, but powerful sorcerer by shouting words at them from an unabridged dictionary.

Dave’s nickname around the neighborhood was Bullshit Nadolski. I knew that his stories were embellished, but I didn’t care. I wanted to roam the open road, take orders from no one, go where I wanted and ride through the rain and sleet and snow. I ached to travel.

One day when Dave, seeing me depressed, suggested that I buy a motorcycle and that we take a long trip, the answer was immediate:

Yes!

****

Chapter 2

Training To Be A Biker; Bumps, Welts And Bruises

It was, Dave had said, to be the greatest trip ever. We’d stay out for six or seven months, who knew, maybe even a year or two. We’d go to California, Mexico, Central America, Canada and Alaska. We’d ride across the frozen Bering Strait, sneak into Russia and destroy it by blowing up its armaments plants, nuclear missile sites and vodka distilleries. We’d crisscross the U.S., and being the bold types that we were, we’d head north in the winter and south in the summer. We’d ride with herds of caribou, elk and buffalo, camp out on glaciers and slide across the squishy tundra. We’d never eat in restaurants. Instead, we’d kill rabbits and snakes and birds and rats and bears and animals on the government’s endangered species list, and we’d steal vegetables from farmers’ fields and dine on mud and our shoes if we had to. Who knew where we’d get money. People might just throw it at us, Dave said. Millionaires stuck with boring lives and nagging wives who depleted their bank accounts faster than our buddies could snort dope might just give us money because they wished they were us, traveling free. We might stumble across stashes of money belonging to drug dealers or TV evangelists or crooked politicians or all of the millions of other people who made money dishonestly. We’d find stashes in abandoned cars, or buried in the ground, and we’d just pluck out a few bills for ourselves and ride away fast.

We might not even need money. People, out of admiration for us, would give us food, clothes, liquor, cigars, oil, motorcycle parts and dental floss. Others, fearing our menacing scowls, negative attitudes and large, Eastern European noses, might give us stuff while begging us not to hurt them.

But that was all for later.

There was immediate business to be taken care of. I had to get a bike and learn how to ride it. That was easy. Dave helped me pick out a big one that didn’t leak too much oil. Within a few weeks of plopping down cash for the machine, I was, like a real biker, violating traffic laws, riding on peoples’ front lawns and laughing about it, shouting insults at other motorists, and ridiculing anyone with a motorcycle smaller than mine.

It felt great.

Dave also had to get a new bike. One of our buddies had busted into his garage one night and stolen his Harley. We had to save money for the trip, so I put in overtime at the grocery store, and Dave worked all kinds of hours at his job parking cars at a downtown parking garage.

And then there was the most important thing. We had to, Dave said one day, get in shape and train for the trip.

That seemed unnecessary to me. I exercised every day and was physically fit. So was Dave. He was always reminding us of what a great track star he was. I reminded him that he always reminded us of that, and that there was no need to go into training.

Fool, he said to me with a look like he believed it, We have to get into biker condition. We have to act, look, smell, think and be like bikers. We must turn ourselves into bikers. Watch this.

He picked up a hammer and started smashing himself on the head with it. And he anticipated my question.

I’m raising bumps, welts and bruise marks, he said with an enthusiasm that scared me. I’m going to layer my head with bumps and sores. And when I get through there ain’t going to be a bumpier head in all the land than mine. It’ll be the bumpiest of the bumpy and even bumpier than that. All bikers got knots on their foreheads. They all look like they’ve been run over by garbage trucks or been beaten with baseball bats. It makes you look tough, goofy and crazy. Who’s gonna mess with someone who looks like they’ve got baseballs and rocks implanted underneath their skin? Nobody, that’s who. You give it a try.

Against my better judgment, I gave myself a few feeble whacks, which of course, didn’t satisfy Dave. He demanded that I hit myself harder. I protested.

Look, can’t I just beat myself up mentally? I do it all the time anyway. My brain is already a giant knot, I said.

Anyone can tell that just by listening to you, true. But sometimes you’re gonna be in situations where you can’t talk, or if you do, people won’t understand you. In those cases you’re going to need your looks to scare people, animals, places and things. And you’re going to need huge bumps to do it. So I say bumpify yourself.

When I protested again, Dave made like he was going to grab the hammer and smash me himself. I figured it was best to hit myself on the head.

After I had raised welts of a sufficient size and number, Dave continued in his efforts to turn me into a biker. One of the most important things I had to learn, he said, was how to act properly when hanging around motorcycle shops on Saturday mornings buying parts. If I didn’t act like a real biker, the real bikers would see that I was a novice and try to kill me, or worse, make fun of me.

This, of course, was years ago, when motorcycling was a hazardous, trying and almost torturous experience. It was a time when only outcasts, nuts and adventurers took cross-county motorcycle trips. This was long before motorcycles had windshields, luggage racks and radios; long before every fat guy and his overweight wife lowered themselves onto enormously expensive vehicles and towed half of their possessions behind them in attempts at roughing it.

Grease, Dave told me. "Grease and more grease. That’s the secret. The more grease you get on your hands, under your fingernails, in your hair, on your face, on your pants and in your brain, the better off you are. And the dirtier the grease, the better. Act stupid, too. The stupider the better. Pretend you don’t know anything about anything but motorcycles. And don’t ever bring a book into a motorcycle shop. Bikers don’t read, unless it’s a shop manual with lots of pictures, or a naked-lady book. Don’t ever, ever bring a naked-man book into one of these joints.

"Don’t ever talk either. At least don’t ever say anything intelligible. These people don’t. Do like I do when I let women know what a great guy I am. Grunt. If you want a part, point to a picture of it in a book and say, ‘Uh.’ And if you do talk, swear constantly. And when you’re not swearing, don’t use any words bigger than ‘The.’

"Start drinking beer constantly, and get up to drinking so much that you need a liver transplant. And then brag about your heavy drinking. Talk about boozing as if it’s a great accomplishment. If you don’t want to drink, at least douse yourself with the stuff. And glue a beer can to your hand, or better yet, to your forehead. Talk constantly about how you have guzzled a twenty-four pack and about how your kidneys hurt.

"Glare at everything and everyone. Look like you want to kill someone. Look like you’ve killed someone an hour ago, and are itching to kill again. Develop a vacant look that says you have no idea why you’re so angry. When you come across white-haired geezers with canes, give them a look like you want to bite off their noses. And then when they walk away trembling with fear, laugh as loud as you can. Children, too, don’t forget them. Stare at them like they’re pests and that the only reason you’re putting up with them is that you don’t have time to kill them.

"Leer at suburban women and jeweled society types—especially the society types—and especially when their husbands are around. Always look like you want to take those women on the spot, no matter where you are. Fondle their jewels.

"Other looks are important, too. Cultivate the oily hair look. You want to make it look like you haven’t washed your hair in years and that you never intend to wash it again. Try to grow lice in your hair. If you can’t, buy some fruit flies from the pet shop and stick them in your hair.

"Don’t ever wash your clothes. Wear filthy blue jeans that are filled with holes, especially in the ass, and don’t wear underwear. If you can’t bring yourself to go underwearless, wear dirty ones. Keep your fingernails untrimmed and black. Don’t ever brush your teeth again. Try to lose some teeth. Bust them out with a hammer if you have to. If you don’t want to do that, at least develop a brownish-green scum on them. Make sure it gets thick and sort of buttery. Apologize for having all your teeth.

If you know anything at all about anything, try to forget it. Empty your brain of all knowledge. If you can’t empty it, pretend that you have. Pretend that you don’t know who the president is, what country you live in, what planet you’re on or what your name is. If someone asks you what two and two is, pretend you don’t know. And then, and this is the key to the whole thing, act like you don’t want to ever know and that you’re proud of your ignorance. Act as if stupidity is rebellious behavior and that you’re some kind of a folk hero for being stupid.

There was more training in the coming weeks. One day, while we were standing in front of an apartment building, Dave started scraping his hands, arms, face and legs against its brick wall.

Abrasions, he said while ordering me to scrape myself. Get them on your face and arms and legs. And get big ones across your forehead.

Why? I wanted to know.

To make it look like you’ve dropped your bike or laid it down.

Why would I want to do that? It’s got a kickstand. Why don’t I just let it stand on the kickstand? And what does scraping my forehead have to do with laying down a bike?

"Fool. Dropping it or laying it down means you’ve crashed the damn machine. And the abrasions mean that you’ve almost died, or that at least you’ve been injured real bad in the crash. The more crashes and the more scabs you have the better biker you are, and the more you will be admired, and the greater chance you’ll have that someone will give you a free beer.

"You’ve got to learn to talk like this: ‘Yeah, uh, laid it down. Uh, wasn’t wearing a helmet. Uh, wasn’t wearing anything, uh, I don’t think. And it was scraping along on the ground, and uh, and sparks were flying everywhere, even my teeth, and gas was pouring out, and it was all over and, uh, was getting soaked and scraped my arm off and my brain fell out of my eye sockets. Uh, wrecked the bike, I guess, uh, demolished it, man. It ain’t good for shit now, and like, uh, it was real cool, man. Uhhhhhhhhh.’

And you’ve got to sound like that’s an accomplishment that you think your mother would be proud of.

But that’s ass backwards. You would think that I would want a sterling driving record, no moving violations in the past three years, and maybe some good driver certificates. You’re telling me that my esteem in the biker community will rise as my driving record deteriorates? That the lousier my driving the better biker I am? That doesn’t make sense.

Of course it doesn’t make sense. None of this does. But it’s true. It’s reality. It’s real life, and that’s all that counts. If you want to stay alive out there you do what I tell you. Now scrape away.

I did. And in the ensuing weeks I learned some of the finer points of being a biker, like how to kick in doors of cars that were stopped at red lights; how to make a quick stop, jump off the bike and beat a car with a chain; how to punch out car windshields without making my hand bleed; how to burp on command, demand other peoples’ money and smile proudly when called a stupid, illiterate, stinking slob.

****

Chapter 3

Departure Date Set

Dave and I stashed away money while the summer and fall weeks passed. I dreamed of the day when I would power up the bike and drive away on a great adventure. But I was getting worried and frustrated. It was almost winter. I figured that meant putting off the trip until the spring. I was depressed. But that changed one day when Dave came by and set the starting date.

We leave, he said, on December 21st. The first day of winter.

That seemed stupid and I said so. But Dave hammered me with his logic.

Who on earth would start a motorcycle trip on the first day of winter? he asked. "Only the greatest, boldest, truest of adventurers and the he-menest of men. Only the boldest of the bold, people like me. Any wimp can ride a motorcycle in the summer when the sun is shinning and children are walking around in shorts. There’s a million mopes who think they’re bold because they ride in the summer and wake up to seventy-degree mornings and sunny days. But that ain’t us. Let me ask you this: How many people want to ride bikes when it’s blizzarding and freezing? How many want to wake up to sub-zero temperatures and try to start bikes that are filled with frozen oil? And who wants to try to light fires and eat breakfast when their hands and arms are frozen solid like a hunk of meat in a freezer?

No one but me and you, that’s who. Can you imagine how incredible it’d be if we die on this thing and they write about us and mention that we left on the first day of winter? If we’re lucky, there’ll be a blizzard on the day we leave. Think of it. There’s more than two hundred million people in this country. We’re going to be the only two leaving on a motorcycle trip from frozen Chicago on the first day of winter. What do you think people will say? And we’re going to head north, too. We’re going to meet those blasts of icy, Canadian air head-on. Nothing’s going to stop us. Do you understand how great this will be?

I did. And I was so excited by the prospect of adventure and notoriety that I blurted out that we should leave in January when it would be even colder.

Nah, Dave said. January is colder, true. But if we make good time we could be in the mountains or in Canada by then where it’ll be sixty below, and we’ll have to bury ourselves in snow to stay warm. We could get frostbite and maybe be forced to cut off a blackened toe or two. That’s adventure.

I agreed, and the departure date was set.

But there was a slight change in plans. One day in early November Dave telephoned me from the campus of Southern Illinois University where he had briefly studied hotel/motel management before dropping out of college. When I asked why he was in Carbondale, which is three hundred and fifty miles south of Chicago, I was told that it was none of my business. The plan for me remained the same, Dave said. I was to leave Chicago in mid-December and drive to Carbondale, from where we would start the trip.

It occurred to me that early November weather in Chicago was relatively warm and pleasant compared to what it would be in mid-December, and that maybe Dave had left early in order get out of riding in cold weather.

But Dave assured me that that wasn’t the case. Circumstances, he said, had forced his early departure. He also said that having to leave Chicago when it was still fairly warm and pleasant was the worst piece of bad luck that had ever hit him, and that he was gravely disappointed at not being able to leave in a mid-December freeze.

In Dave’s absence, though, I slipped back into my old bad habits of negative thinking. Taking a motorcycle trip in the middle of winter was stupid, I thought. We would freeze to death in some desolate mountain pass, and when they found us in the summer people would know our names and remember us, not for our daring-do, but for our stupidity.

I pictured the headlines: Fools Freeze To Death! The Inside Story Of History’s Dumbest Trip! or Stupidity To The Millionth Degree!

But my worries were stupid and unfounded, Dave said, because all I needed to do to avoid disgrace was to dress warm. So I did.

****

Chapter 4

Frozen Solid!

The thermometer outside my house on December 15th read a disappointing twenty-two degrees. That was balmy, I thought. Any wimp could have started a cross-country motorcycle trip in such warm weather. Why couldn’t it have been colder, I complained to myself, like about zero?

I had taken Dave’s advice, and I had something to prove. A lot of things in life scared me—people who smiled, sunny days and ordering a pizza over the telephone—but not the weather. I knew I could bust out of my miserable neighborhood existence and make myself a man. And it all started with beating