“All Purpose”

By Apostoly P. Kouroumalis

Fragments, word salads, comprise the body of “All Purpose,” a collection of short stories and poems by Toly A. K. that sometimes delve into the paranormal, ethereal, and the eccentricities of everyday life.

Some stories are drawn from an iconoclast/cartoonish satire side of the author’s drama self.
—painter’s perspective

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514487044

Book preview

ALL PURPOSE

Apostoly P. Kouroumalis

Copyright © 2016 by Apostoly P. Kouroumalis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Portrait photo : Luc LaFlamme

Cover photo: Toly A.K.

Rev. date: 04/28/2016

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Do You Want Me to Cry

No way out of Osceola.

Lunch and Dillinger

You Really Fucked Me

PIG

The mundane lyrics

THE COURT JESTER

Spider Lilly- Holocaust Quebec 2

old writing:

666

Is It War?

Mr. Bones

POETRY 2000 - 2016

Death Republica-when the sun meets the earth

Fragments, Word salads, comprise the body of All Purpose-

a collection of short stories and poems by Toly A.K. which sometimes delve into the paranormal, ethereal and the eccentricities of everyday life.

-the painters perspective-

Some stories are drawn from an iconoclast/cartoonish satire side of the authors drama self.

DO YOU WANT ME TO CRY

Apostoly P. Kouroumalis© 2009

Dedicated to my Mother, Sunday.

1.

The rain in Spain falls neatly on the plains, she said. I wondered about where it was from but the conversation quickly turned to the weather. It’s a sure fire sign the conversation is pretty much dead at that point. I wanted to reach my hand up her top and feel her tonsils on the top of my tongue, analyze the bumpy ridges. You always remember scenes like that, y’know, cornering a girl down and bringing her around to you like in those Hollywood romances where the dude is ultra-man and gets the girl - it’d be cool if a girl’d come onto a guy once in awhile instead of going Amy Fisher on his ass every time he farts a dyslexic pass or come on.

I remember the spring of 1942 I was on the edge of a rowboat with a backpack full of grenades and revolvers, I had packed my father’s 6 shot in a finely wrapped dishrag. I jumped off the edge of the boat as a war gunboat came around the corner spotting my uncle and me close to the edge of the water. As we and others tried to escape from the village Gythio to another which was also close by the water’s edge.

The weight of the arsenal on my back dragged me down deep into the thick murky water, I tried to swim to the top but couldn’t. I was losing air quick and swallowed a gulp of ocean water and choked just as a man reached down and pulled me from the brink and dragged me to shore until my feet could touch sand. I never saw the man’s face, out of the water, climbing through thickets of under brush; I reached a small broken down shack where my father was with a small battalion of rebel guerrillas. He reached into the bag and pulled out a sopping pistol. He turned and smacked me hard across the face.

The cork on the bottle popped open as the cherry rattled between his teeth.

You gonna pour that or stare at your feet all night breathing through your mouth?

The brat walks into the room.

Shit, just a minute, she says.

Go to bed, she says sternly.

The smart mouth yelp lets out the funniest thing. I heard all night, saluting her Yes, sir! She slaps him hard across the face and I’ll be damned, the kid doesn’t let out a peep, but his eyes roll back a big bundle or piss forms underneath him. I walk over and shake the kid to, and put him to bed. The next day I walk over to the bakers and the fucker that used to own a pet store says, That crazy bitch lay into ya last night.

I could hardly muster a smile. As I looked around, it seemed we were the talk of the town, it was either her ransacking of people’s carcasses for her wardrobe or the tent was popping in my pants for the girl. My dick was so hard in my pants that a sharp breeze could muster a drip at the end of my pee hole.

She left on the midnight Greyhound for New York, sporting a new Mohawk in search of better times, leaving the antiseptic sponged youth with a girlfriend. She left me holding my pecker as the boat carrying my next meal ticket left for Africa.

I kept the old girl greased with a little spit and elbow grease, she’d spit little puddles of salt water as we clunked along. I rattled the bars behind the backs of other merchants in arms as they dug needles into their arms, my ghost sounds, which consisted of rattling the pipes of the ship with a wrench, would send them into paranoid frenzy.

My whole dilemma was feeding family members back home while having a row of my own, leaving my guitar back home.

The turntable drops a vinyl down and an overdone metal track comes blasting through the speakers. A drunkard slams down his glass hard, screaming at some girls and lunges toward one, hitting her hard square in the face as a bottle smashes next to my leg. I say to Kate, Let’s blow this popsicle stand. I drop my beer glass on the hard floor, it shatters - a bouncer quickly whisks me out of the room. That was it for Kate and me; she stuck to her girlfriends after that. Now you have to understand something about Kate, she had corns like my mother, and would be sure to mention my mother whenever I got too rowdy; she was a quiet girl with an angry spirit that I never got to know. After that night I felt like it was hard times at porcelain God - time for prayer.

I had moved into a recording studio where I was fucking with a B.C. rich bitch and a keyboard, and after breaking a bunch of bottles, a fellow who was kicking it with the landlord who fashioned himself as mystic threatened to shove a shotgun down my throat where I slept. I quickly bought a mickey of JD and got drunk with him. After a fond headlock later, he turned out to be an ex-con with a rap sheet for murder. This came as no shock to me about beautiful B.C. After going on beer runs for a guy under house arrest who would sneak out and buy me drinks at the local Greek bar which I was scoffed at for being broke and a bum.

I was sleeping on the floor of a pretty nice attached bungalow with a pet iguana which made me think of that old Richard Burton movie Night of the Iguana. So I decided to violate the dream and lure older women to roost, living on credit and could scarcely afford a meal some days. My roommate would bring me day old Danishes from the gas station she worked at. I happened upon a health store and acquired some sleeping pills with a dose of Belladonna laced to them which made the days roll by until I found one of my other roommate’s feet on my ass because I’d been sleeping for four days - the way she typed made me horny thinking about if she fucked as hard.

Sitting on a street corner by a lamp post, a Haida woman walked by holding a paper bag and a bunch of groceries, we exchanged conversation for awhile and she left me with the paper bag which turned out to be full of pot to give her brother the bags of groceries. I thought about taking off with the bag of pot, but felt I’d never be trusted again with joint even though I hardly smoked, she returned and we went to my place where she told me she had two teenage kids that I met later on. After we partied, we flipped through the encyclopedia under tight rump for a kick.

Her son liked to play with this switchblade gizmo and I’ll be damned but the tyke cut a Nike swoosh into my middle finger.So I say, Let’s make a commercial, and the whole town goes batty because they see me walking around with a camera I picked up from street urchin as they call them over there, which had a tape inside of a happy couple and their grow operation. I quickly destroyed the tape and ended up switching an Elvis shirt for a sky blue tee with her. I felt like my pecker was gonna fall off because when she went down on me it was almost like she wanted to bite it off. I felt so small underneath her, eating her out, but I couldn’t get enough.

Her daughter gave me a bird house that I wanted to hang in a tree at my folk’s place, but my old man has a way of making things disappear. She gave pots and pans and a phone I still use and a punch bowl that I gave to my friend for being a good sport while I was down.

I sat on the floor of my wife’s apartment back when we were still the dynamic duo. Broke and sharing the pot from the food bank our neighbor would save for us and meditated while trying to remember the Tibetan Book of the Dead and trying to find some application for it in order to formulate some path to my life which had taken a turn for the better, as my belly grumbled I thought of the trifle things that would set her off into a hollering watch with her and those around her and those around me back home. I attributed these outbursts to beer, need, mushrooms eaten or in combination and the wanderlust that would leave us at the edge of Death Valley giving a ride to a guy from New Orleans in search of spawn ranch and a transmission for his busted out black Ranger.

It took awhile but I realized I was an idiot and decided to look for a job after a quick bite at the local greasy fast food joint. The chicken burgers would make me salivate which was just plain my fat head talking. I crossed the street; a woman was walking by me with her head down, lost in thought as a car was racing toward her. I stuck my arm out and I damn near clothes-lined her as the car came to a screeching halt. She turned and thanked me as if not wanting to be stopped and continued with her head put down. I felt pretty good because she would have hit the windshield pretty hard. I felt like I might have saved her life. I still had just enough for a burger and needed to score a smoke and quite frankly, I don’t think she realized the whole thing happening.

The drill sergeant cornered the marine and dragged him against the wall. Another merch cracked a bottle in two as they ripped his pants off and shoved the broken beer bottle up his ass.

The cook standing next to me on the assembly line smacks me in the back of the head and asks me, If I’m a real man, I’d drop my penis on the table and he’d chop around it. Now, you gotta remember that I was thirteen.

I catch them doing the robot and peeking at girly magazines even though they’d ream one another.

I sat on the deck of the boat. The captain came up to me and lifted his leg onto the railing. His dumbass shorts were too small and he sat there telling me a story about the glory days with his dick flopped out the side of his shorts. The fucker was hung like a horse.One day he told me he’d send me back to my folks with my arms and legs missing and shave my head so the neighbors could call me Nugget.

I worked in the greasy asshole of a small suburb from a young age and come to think of assholes worked with a bunch of queers, not that I cared, who had to explain that they took it in the ass to a ten year old. The ex-cons had a better idea - feeding me as much dope as possible. Smart immigrant kids that are too punk or metal aren’t well liked in this suburb especially if you’re locked up in one nuthouse after another. But, he can get a girl off so that she’ll remember her ancestors, come to think of it, that only happened to me once - a girl seeing her past life during orgasm. But then again one can never know. The question of cumming always comes up, especially with the silent girls, holding back the hellcat - that makes men fight each other and puke their guts out on a street corner only to return to their corporate hum drum reality and a night at the strip bar to walk into a peelers ear, about how fat their wife’s ass has gotten and how thick their wallets are getting.

One day on a cold summer morning which was real weird shit because it was summer and all - the greasy hole that was my job spat out another pizza and the fucker who wanted to chow down on the sit was complaining that the night before, I picked up and bolted for the nearest watering hole where a creature of darkness shifted her way into my embrace. We made out over the counter.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty fuckin’ cheery, but I was laced to the hilt on beer in that cold mug so much that she dropped me leaving me scratching the chunks out of my beard again. Maybe it was the dank, ripe smell of puke on my breath? Who could tell? Just about then the phone went off and my ex-wife was calling about being too in love with her own death to continue breathing. This made me want to crawl into a corner and drink more as I talked her out of her suicidal epiphany. Moribund as the moments are. Moribund as the moments are.

Pulling me out of a somnambulist trance again; Was another Motorhead track but I was on the fast track to being sober yesterday, why, even practicing transcendental meditation but finding myself the carbon archetype from Don Juan’s journal of madmen who smoked cigarettes and drink too much after not understanding the little smoke.

Here ye, hear ye, to manifest destiny - knew I should have quit smoking.

Long stares in the mirror on the high doses of LSD laced night. The past, a recollection of nostalgic memoirs - quiet moments in the abyss, funny how it would always rain after while coming down - the misty fog feeling like it was the first breath you ever took all over again - but then I was strangled at birth. Funny how people keep turning up everywhere I go from my hometown, I met Rosemary tonight and we shared a similar disdain for the place - and then there are the shadows crouching in the dark, those illuminated figures of night, kind of like they crept out of a horror movie - fuckin’ to poles - one night I awoke to find a white ivory item pole staring down near my bed, I knew it was there because my girlfriend saw it was well. I jumped up and swung at it, out of, kind of anger I guess for being in our space and for waking me up, which is some selfish shit. It felt like a letdown afterwards though, personal on some level, it was like I could see light reflecting from it and glowing at the same time. I felt like I made a juggernaut mistake.

She brushed up against me with her back turned, damn this girl for saving my life, she’ll be walking them golden stairs when she dies, but I’d rather climb well worn stairs with her and be a bog in the History department, nostalgic idiot.

Aw, hell, you fucked up retard, have a beer.

In August 1976, at around 4:00 pm, I was confronted with a news broadcast about the death of Elvis. Sitting in the back of a beat up, tan ‘72 Torino I didn’t think much of, we were driving through farmlands in rural Quebec. I often jazzed as the French say to friends over drinks that the spirit of Elvis leapt into my body that day like all those dead Indians leapt into Jim Morrison, it all a laugh which is the last laugh like in the Murnau film Sad Ghetto Clown.

I even went as far as to visit Two Guns, Arizona where a bunch of cowboys cornered and massacred a tribe of Indians in a cave, women, children, elders. I stood at the front of the cave with she who is apart from me and felt the chill. A shrill, sharp sound gave us the creeps as we loaded a mag into a 16 mm Bolex and felt like we were alone in the world yet perfectly content.

I had 20 bones to spend and she who is no longer a part of things as it is now went on to suggest we get some tacos. We sat at the picnic table and petted a puppy as a young kid brought us the tacos. I think we smelled pretty ripe which was funny to them - we had been taking baths in lakes for a couple of days by then.

Her stiff little fingers pressed into my spine as she lay on top of me.

That’s your bladder line, she said. As I lay on my stomach, I was beginning to feel like I had some semblance of a life again.

I pressed my nose into her ear and sniffed around like a puppy.

Where were you when the music died? she asks.

Probably squirming around in my old man’s nut on a boat near Johannesburg,I shrug.

It snarled a toothy snarl again, in an encompassing melancholy bliss, and there she is again being all in the midst of a bleeding womb. The wound that awaits at the end of a 3" blade or a corkscrew to divide the intestines or lick the eyeball into the brain, belching barf she sleeps awake in the void kicking herself and me back to life, so little aware yet totally totally awake on the edge of death. The tragedy of divine vision an all encompassing stare, I not wanting to awake her from her moment while others stare headlong in the wreck, I only see the longing of the infinite in her eye. Ride like the devil, thanks for the kick, feeling more awake - that girl hates my guts but I don’t know why. Yes I know it doesn’t.

A place to rest my weary head, I said and she laughed and said,

What the fuck does this guy want?

Icy blue stares on rocky crag and the past a heap of stuff to carry in a little box in your head.

Let it go, she told me. It’s the past that makes you. You’ve got a belly full and too much heartache that the drink ain’t gonna shake off.

She didn’t call.

She who is all calls but does not answer in words.

But she called and spoke in a sweet whisper that the blasted music from the cafe drowned - I think the worst thing you could do to a girl is make her repeat herself, especially if she’s purring - she who is all - purrs in her sleep. Some would call it a snore, but I beg to differ.

Glass of wine my spirits alive while they wait to cut open the demon barber, nothing like waiting to have your chest cut open to install lightning into your chest to make your blood pump.

A buddy has invited me to NY. We met in Death Valley alongside she who is apart when we stood like Cerberus barking, the body of it stands yawning.

How do you feel now, the dream conceived, eternal? she said as the 1/4 tape flapped on a roll out in the nick of time.

At the end of November, I said. A place to crash and a duck a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya, and wine in Alphabet Park with the thought of finding the Pigeon King of the rooftop.

The blood has dried the ephemeral kiss from the abyss. A slashed palm to drink the drink - bull’s eye she said - tang - said Kilgore trout - who’s the girl - that asshole - head shake and the kill quake to exalt the tomb - the cut appeared from nowhere? And you drank - I heard, no, understood without conviction or doubt - drink - from the bottomless well - but a drop did fall - live forever from the well - peace! - I love.

Have a smoke I thought. Kickass. I want to lick the ooze from your ass - she thought of me - Sweet Sid she said? No, not us or I but drink the eye of smoke, she thought. A tongue in my eyeball she thought but doth she stillith not in the weediest of moments - not that tired - Kill! Kill! Kill!

The man who holds his ear in the same old shirt - yeah - dresses him in spiritual garb - they’ll follow him to the ends of the earth.

They the almighty fuck in they.

I want to fuckin’ kick yer ass, fuckwad!

TV announcers are fucking geek’s man – queue on your hair out, fuckin’ metal head asshole.

I wanna feel your fuckin’ hot kooch.

No he did.

Do you fucking blame me?

Wha? Well, I’m fuckin’ tryin’.

I got a bag full of butt raunchies.

Yuck!

We - Ass rapists - fuck!?

You fucked us over 45 billion dollars profit through tax to fund your politician’s campaign.

We’re sensationalized war, what kind of society are we living in?

Ladies, you’re welcome and thank you.

Wha? You think you’re a ?

Ava it was Abeille to 50 stay awake long enough.

In a fistful - anger. Hunger - remember I said to her - don’t get used to leisure - it doesn’t last. Cold people - heartless drug friends to pay each other’s back - I’ve got a rich pappy. You last longer, while we take and take for Prada and an ex-XXXX26 with fur lined cunt fully equipped with a cock massacre in the back at and a plastic Dadaist pussy, vintage Amber Lynn darlin’ the minivan moves an inch - then stops - she said must break the man in you before you to make my son rich, he went to Ryerson you see - raised on brown bread and whole wheat - he rode his bicycle on St. Laurent - he drives off in a Porsche. Rolo toxic slicks.

As I sat in the driver’s seat, she began to purr in that soft snore of slumber, wrapped in a Mexican blanket with the $2 flip flops I measured by eye, not wanting to face the morning or the people around her.

I want to sleep in a cemetery.

Not tonight, it’s too far.

Then she fell into the waking dreams of the sandman’s realm. Smoking a cigarette and watching two lovers on bikes kiss next to us - I watched the rain slowly trickle down the windshield.

It is not gonna last, take a breath, and drive around the block.

She smiled at me and brought about a devastating feeling in me.

I want to kill, I thought to myself. This girl’s gonna gnaw my arm off or tear out my heart and have it for a beer chaser. Vodka is her poison. That gets her more hummin’ like a chainsaw in preacher boy’s arse. Late nights, confusing rendezvous on birthday nights that never happen - waiting by the window wondering wondering if she hasn’t gotten herself in over her head again, all the while, still, when she’s here to forget the outside world, my past - an endless bottomless drink - Elle me morde parce que I’m not in my body Je veux etre morte avec elle chaque soir. A chance meeting in a doorway to a bar - the chaos reigning within a warm place to bury my head in her chest.

So it is said love under will - she turned to me and smirked in that coy way, Six, our cat in her arms, there we stood, dressed in black in the waning moon a night after Halloween at the local witchcraft store wanting to burn down the block with a stare, in our little mode of expression.

She wrote me a sonnet on a wrinkled piece of paper with little bits of foam printed in green, I don’t really like Valentine’s Day either, sometimes it feels like you pried the flesh from my body with your teeth only to sit in quiet reflection at your bar stool and plan a murder. I stand accused of being fleet of thought and angry in dementia and wanton of the waning moon neatly finger painted on your little tummy. Yar she blows again, cursing me for coughing and smoking while hacking up her dinner.

You want to die! she hollers, frustrated while dying inside, her bedroom, a ripe nucleus of chaos, while her obsession with Winston Churchill and Ted Bundy may make her own political prisoner.

Tu me manque, elle me dit, together we sit on her divan covered with orange garbage bags with the gentle sound of bed bugs fornicating. I remember sitting on a grassy knoll one evening while she screamed into the phone I’ve lost my mind, I don’t know where I am! A hive of army ants rustled underneath my arse, lo and behold, I was sitting on a nest. Just my dumb luck, I got up quickly, scratching them off, remembering that there was a serial killer loose in the city. And where I sat in the corner, just below, a month ago, ripping matches out of a matchbook and mailing a small bonfire out of the matchsticks for her in some romantic delusion that she’d spend some time with me on my shabby bedspread for awhile. The spaghetti bubbled over in the kitchen while I pulled her jeans off, sweet mama she’s shaved clean and wet. I make the mistake of telling her that if she mentions my mother, my dick will go limp. Sitting in the restaurant booth side by side, she’s a little frustrated with my drinking and being a nut, both our asses start burning. We kind of look at each other and without saying anything, I casually take the whisky bottle out of my back pocket.

Great, now we got whiskey arse.

Breaking the ice between us, she drops the bombshell by telling me that she’s going home to her mother’s in Calgary because she is afraid of falling in love.

I usually only see people for three months, she says.

I hardly see you at all, I say. When we’re together, we hardly talk, just drink.

I don’t like it when you drink, you act bizarre, I remember Alice saying - she hated being around me but she’d let me into her bed from time to time.

Can’t seem to sleep some nights, had the shivers, too much dope maybe, or not enough. Fucking meds have made half a man of me.

She calls me a moron and gives me a hug.

Back at the bar, the other doormen fend off a barrage of UFC office gumba’s from actual UFC fighters - more beer thoughts come to mind - another weekend with the wind whipping in my bars and walking for forty minutes in 40 below weather, jobs opening up as concierge/janitor- taking it and chilling, on edge 24 hours ain’t helpin’, but groceries don’t come cheap. I should probably drink less coffee, smoke more pot and drink more beer, I’d probably live longer. Gen and I are done, she says she wants to start at ground zero, we still call each other. Jen across the street invited me for a glass of wine, she says her crack addict boyfriend just won’t come home. Old me thought of slipping a hand into her crotch, she calls at 4:00am, digs my art - Gen on the other hand finds it a bore - we got along better within 5 minutes of breaking up than we had in a month. Greg seems to think it’s because she doesn’t have to think about sex but she’s a total porn fuck but balls after which was making me want to kill a couple people.

One night Greg’s got a plan to kill himself, so I take him through it for 2 or 3