Heebie

By Victor Allen

Andy Warhol once said everybody in America would have their fifteen minutes of fame. But what would you do and who would you use to get it? Heebie is a simple cemetery caretaker with a strange gift. A gift that will trap him in the nightmare of one deranged teen's twisted dream of fame and glory... Heebie. One of twenty six stories in A-Sides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victor Allen
• Release date: Oct 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370592579

Victor Allen

Born in North Carolina in 1961, Victor Allen has lived a charmed, black and white, and almost disreputable life. Turned down by the military at age seventeen because of a bad heart (We would take, his recruiter told him, the women and children before we would take you), he spent a wasted year at NCSU, where he augmented his scant college funds by working part-time as a stripper (what the heck? Everybody looks good when they're eighteen), a pastime he quickly gave up one night when he discovered -to his mortification- his divorced, middle-aged mother sitting in the audience. Giving NCSU the good old college miss, he satisfied his adventurous spirit and wanderlust by moving out West in his late teens, first to Colorado and later, Wyoming, and working in the construction trades. Uprooted from his small town upbringing and thrust into a world of real Cowboys and Indians, oil field roughnecks, biker gangs and pool sharks, he spent his youth travelling the country, following the work, settling at various times in Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Colorado, and Wyoming. Along the way he met a myriad of interesting people including Hollywood, a young, Native American man, so called because he wore his sunglasses all the time, even at night; Cinderella K from Owensville, Missouri (the nice laundry lady who turned his shorts into pinkies); Lori P., the Colorado snake lady and her pet boa constrictor, Amanda; the pool hustler par excellence, Johnny M.; TJ, Moon, and Roundman, good folks, but bikers, all; his little blond girlfriend, Lisa; Maureen, the very funny lady from London with the very proper English accent, who he met while living outside of Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, SC, and her daughter, Marie, with her practically incomprehensible cockney twang; the ever bubbly Samantha from FLA; and all the (well, never mind). :-). Plus way too many others too numerous to list. He has weathered gunfire, barroom brawls (I didn't get this crooked nose and all these scars on my face from kissin), a three-day mechanical breakdown in the heart of the Louisiana bayous, drunken riots- complete with car burnings and overturnings, Budweiser, bonfires and shootin' irons (it was all in good fun, though,)- ; a hundred year blizzard, floods, two direct lightning strikes, a hurricane which sent a tree crashing through his roof, and an unnerving late night encounter with a man who subsequently proved to be a murderer, surviving it all with a rather uncom...

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Heebie

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2014

All Rights Reserved

Mary Smith-Costanza

1914-1982

Weep Not for her Death

But Rejoice in New Life

Heebie stood in front of the gravestone. His smallish head was bowed, impaled like a shrunken apple atop his carrot neck. Most thought him to be in his late forties or early fifties. A short man, not much bigger than a teen aged boy, who survived by doing odd jobs around town. He walked with a hyperbolized, apelike swagger, his shoulders dipping from side to side. Many thought it was simply to exaggerate his small frame and make him feel less threatened. His large hands, unlike those of a teenager, were buried past his knobby wrists in the pockets of his green work pants. The thirty years out of date Members Only jacket he wore in the spring and summer would soon be replaced by his fall and winter, G1 bomber jacket with the fur-lined collar. A baseball cap stippled with white, dried salt flats sat low on his forehead, concealing the sparse thicket of greasy black hair struggling to eke out a living on his reddened and flaking scalp.

What was known about him was mostly rumor. It was known that, as a boy, he had been taken care of by Theodora Wilson, a spinster aunt and Baptist Church deacon who had enigmatically vanished from town for six months in her youth, on the face of it to take care of a sick relative. She was known as Ted to the Town’s folk, and Mama Ted to Heebie. Present at her deathbed was Aaron Kravitz of Temple Beth Immanuel and, most assumed, Theodora’s consort of the past forty years. Most also believed him to be Heebie’s father, a fact in plain sight that was comfortably unseen by both the Temple and the Baptist church. As Mama Ted returned for the second time from the white light corridor in response to Aaron’s tearful pleas, she told Heebie to run him out.

He’s just being selfish. This is the second time he’s called me back while I was talking to God, and I don’t want to come back again.

A discomposed and sobbing Aaron was dispatched to the sitting room with the other death watchers, complaining only that the goy boy had thrown him out. Heebie’s name, however, had not derived from his suspected Semitic heritage, but because the residents of the black neighborhood known as Tucker Town would always preface anything referring to Heebie with "He be crazy. It was only a short leap from He be" to Heebie, and everyone called him that now.

When Mama Ted passed, it was assumed, without any real facts at hand, that Heebie would be taken care of by the county, but nobody was really sure. Whether he was or not really never seemed that important to investigate and he simply drifted through his own life and the life of the town as the local character.

The early morning, late summer sun wrote soothing shadows from the tombstones, not stark etchings that clawed at the ground like talons. Birds twittered and chirped in pleasing discord. Heebie would now and then nod his head or reveal his coffee-stained teeth in a smile, as if agreeing with something.

That’s right, Mrs. Smith-Costanza, he said. That’s just right. Kids today don’t have no respect. Mama Ted always told me to respec’ my elders. I know she’s got a special place in Baptist Heaven for lookin’ after me. When you’re done with your fish fry there on the Catholic side of heaven, you’ll say hey for me?

Heebie