Scummer

By John Wayne Comunale

A filthy barfly haunts the bar down the road. He lives off the leftover dregs of the patrons’ beers and spent cigarettes he finds on the ground. He may be living in the trunk of someone’s car. His name is Scummer. He’s mysterious and elusive. He’s unbound by inhibitions and you want to be just like him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Wayne Comunale
• Release date: Jun 29, 2018

John Wayne Comunale

John Wayne Comunale lives in the land of purple drank known as Houston, Texas. He is a writer for the comedic collective, MicroSatan, and contributes creative non-fiction for the theatrical art group, BooTown. When he’s not doing that, he tours with the punk rock disaster: johnwayneisdead. He is the author of The Porn Star Retirement Plan, Charge Land, and Aunt Poster as well as writer/illustrator of the comic-zine: The Afterlife Adventures of johnwayneisdead. John Wayne is an American actor who died in 1979.

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Scummer

By John Wayne Comunale

Copyright 2018 John Wayne Comunale

Smashwords Edition

Scummer copyright © 2018 by John Wayne Comunale. All rights reserved.

Published by Grindhouse Press

PO BOX 293161

Dayton, Ohio 45429

Grindhouse Press logo and all related artwork copyright © 2018 by Brandon Duncan. All rights reserved.

Cover design copyright © 2018 by Squidbar Designs. All rights reserved.

Scummer

Grindhouse Press # 039

ISBN-13: 978-1-941918-32-6

ISBN-10: 1-941918-32-8

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase and additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publish

Other titles by John Wayne Comunale

The Porn Star Retirement Plan

Charge Land

Aunt Poster

John Wayne Lied to You . . .

Death Pacts and Left-Hand Paths

For the Scum of the Earth, those who pull their pants all the way down to the floor when they piss, and my precious pocket-fork. May you all find the stale, warm backwash you’re looking for in life.

Chapter 1

I became obsessed with a guy who lived in the neighborhood. I don’t know for sure that he lived in the neighborhood because I was pretty sure he didn’t actually live anywhere. Also, I wasn’t obsessed with him in some over-sexed, perverted kind of way. It was more like I had taken a deep interest in this man for my own personal form of research on social behavior. His name was Scummer, which of course wasn’t his given name, but was all anyone called him.

He’d earned this moniker through years of engaging in less than desirable activities, activities many people would call ‘scummy’. A few of his signature moves included drinking the bottom of beers left behind by patrons leaving the bar, picking up mostly smoked cigarette butts—what he referred to as ‘shorts’—and finishing off the last puff or so left in them, and using the bathroom anywhere and everywhere without a care in the world. He was the Scummer and this is what he did. If you didn’t like it you were the asshole, as far as he was concerned. You just had to make the adjustment or you’d drive yourself crazy trying to wrap your mind around a person such as Scummer, especially when you realized no one could explain it to you and, more importantly, no one was going to do anything about it.

Scummer wasn’t the most intimidating person around, but his less than desirable aesthetic was more than enough to keep even the most brazenly confident at bay. His hair was silver and hung halfway down his back in thin, greasy strands clumped together by the poisonous buildup created from years without a washing. His hair wasn’t thinning as much as it was just falling out in clumps. The top and sides of his head were dappled with bald patches of varying size, and you could see where small groupings of hair had given up the ghost and upended themselves from the tyranny of Scummer’s scalp. To make matters worse, the patches of skin from which the hair had taken its leave were covered in scabs and lesions Scummer liked to scratch, as evidenced by their constant moistness. The oozing juices played a large part in the consistency his remaining hair had taken on and, while the overall affect was not appealing by any standards, the fluid leaking from those scabs sure gave him the shiniest hair at the bar.

The scabs and sores from Scummer’s head had migrated down to his face in what may very well have been a meticulously planned sneak attack on their part to sabotage what, if any, appealing features he may have once possessed. They were spaced evenly, but that didn’t help detract from the damage the things had ravished upon his visage. The sores were in a constant and never-ending cycle of healing, letting me know Scummer must have scratched and picked at them just as much as the ones on his head. They were easy to ignore, if you practiced, except for one in particular that drew your attention regardless of how powerful your will to look away was. The offending scabby sore sat an inch below his right eye, just barely touching the side of his nose. The size, color, and consistency of the scab was always changing thanks to Scummer’s obsessive scratching, which added to its ability to catch anyone off guard, but it also seemed to posses some power of its own. It compelled you look no matter how hard you tried not to, like its very existence depended on your acknowledgment of it. The weeping wound beneath the left side of his mouth was semi-concealed by the constant presence of a dangling cigarette. Not that this made it any less off-putting, but I like to think it was a courtesy Scummer extended to those brave enough to actually talk to him.

He rarely smiled, but if you happened to witness one of those few and rare moments when he did you would call home immediately and thank your mother for forcing you to go the dentist all those times as a child. It wasn’t that Scummer didn’t have teeth. He had plenty of them, in fact. The problem was none of them looked like they were in the right place in his mouth. It was like his permanent teeth all decided to play a game of musical chairs inside his gums before popping out into his mouth moments after sitting down wherever they found an empty chair. Another clear issue was that none of his teeth were able to get on the same page as far as what direction they should all come out facing. The odd-shaped gaps between misplaced teeth projecting from the gum line at abnormal angles weaved back and forth against each other, adding to the sheer monstrousness of Scummer. The teeth didn’t look like they belonged inside of a human mouth and were instead better suited for the creatures from old pulp horror novels. Those were just stories though and monsters aren’t real, but if you happened to glance into the gaping maw of Scummer, you’d believe they were.

Several strands of his hair fell past his shoulders coming to a halt just above his b-cup man-tits in a knotted explosion of split-ends tangled so far into each other the only remedy left was a pair of scissors. His unfortunate man-mammary developments rested gently atop the curve of a beer belly that had taken years of care and commitment to cultivate. His stomach was round but looked hard to the touch. Not like it was full of cement or anything like that, but more like it was under a tremendous amount of pressure from something on the inside trying desperately to escape. These upper body abnormalities were covered by a yellow t-shirt Scummer seemed to perpetually wear and, at first glance, appeared pleasing to the eye as the color complemented his sickly, liver spotted and sore-covered skin. After a second look it became clear the shirt’s original color was white, but a mixture of sweat, dirt, and whatever other awful substance secreted from Scummer’s pores had permanently changed it.

The rest of his typical daily garb consisted of blue jeans a size too big that hung halfway down his pathetically flat ass and appeared to be held up only by the help of the under side of his tremendous gut which pressed down hard against the denim, pinning it to his waist in lieu of a belt. These jeans were typically torn and tattered and streaked brown from him constantly rubbing his filthy tobacco and skeeze-covered hands up and down the front of them. I never saw Scummer wear anything different, but I chose to assume he had a full wardrobe of the same items and wore a new set daily. Thinking this way helped me to better understand the mystique I believed surrounded the man. Otherwise, trying to wrap my mind around his very existence could quite possibly drive me insane.

Everyone knew Scummer but he didn’t really have any friends, or at least any that would claim him. The closest thing to what appeared to be an actual relationship with someone came in the form of an old barfly named Barbara. If you were going by appearances only Scummer and Barbara would look like a matching set. She was old, but a lifetime of cigarettes, alcohol, and bad decisions left her looking weathered well past her actual age. Wrinkles cut deep into sagging flesh hanging loose from either side of her face, undulating like waves of the incoming tide with the slightest turn of her head. No amount of makeup could help the poor woman but it didn’t stop her from trying, as the layers of multiple applications flaked off in chunks after being chewed between the fleshy face folds. She looked like a clown burned in a car fire.

Her eye shadow was always blue and a Virginia Slim was always dangling between thin red lips pursed tightly against the unfortunate once-over life had given her. One thing Barbara wasn’t was shy, and she never missed an opportunity to demonstrate this to everyone and anyone who happened to be within earshot of her at the bar. Alas, she was never revealed as a horribly disfigured clown but would fall over herself to tell you how twenty-five years ago she had stuck her finger up GG Allin’s asshole at one of his final shows.

He dropped his pants and hung his ass out over the side of the stage, she would say, so I just slid my finger right in without no lube or nothin’. I felt like it was what GG wanted me to do.

She was actually probably right, as I personally can’t imagine GG Allin not wanting her or anyone else unfortunate enough to see him perform live stick a finger, amongst other things, up his ass. I imagined Scummer had heard Barbara’s ass finger story more than anyone else at the bar had, and I was sure he shared some stories of his own about various items going in and coming out of his ass.

Scummer vexed me. Everybody knew who he was, but nobody seemed to actually know him or act like they cared to. His only companionship came in the form of a dried up she-beast who clawed her way up from hell every once in a while to share a drink with the guy, but who was Scummer? At the time, I had no idea why I was so drawn to this strange man but one thing became quite clear . . . I needed to know this man. My life depended on it.

Chapter 2

The first time I met Scummer was, of course, at the bar, but more specifically in the men’s room. Also, I didn’t meet him as much as I woke him up, and even then I use the term ‘woke’ loosely. I was new in town and had only come into the bar twice before. I guess I was more like ‘sort of’ new, since I’d moved here after the divorce four months prior. I mostly stayed in and kept to myself during those first months, nursing a feeling of inadequacy I secretly reveled in while at the same time feeling absolute dread over having to eventually let people into my life again. I passed the bar every day on my way to and from work and always told myself I was going to eventually stop, which was just a self-serving, empty promise until I pulled into the parking lot one day instead of going home. I didn’t even realize it until I found myself sitting there parked next to a slate gray K-car with out-of-state plates and a ring of rust crusted over the lower eight inches of the vehicle’s body, threatening to devour the entire thing at any moment.

On the other side of my car was a dumpster. It too had been equally plagued by rust as crumbling maroon tarnish