Chapter 1
“Ayo Beans, you got a smoke?” I shook my head as I tried to wake up from the incredible night I had babysitting a middle age man. I mean, I’m 28, what else would I enjoy doing more than spending the night washing drool and vomit out of my boots. Bad enough I had to carry the guy over my shoulder like a man purse, but when he has a few too many, he can’t aim for the floor? Jesus, these boots were union paid! I’m poor enough as it is! My life stinks. Literally, these shoes smell like moldy fruit and fat people on road trips. It’s okay, though, because I got a wife to complain to about it. My wife is both a great listener and imaginary. She’s got an awesome personality, but a little fake. Great kisser. I’d apologize for the sarcasm, but I don’t want to, so I’ll just keep telling this story in this tone. If you don’t like it, well shucks.
I should explain who I have to babysit. I am the head of Abraham Lincoln’s protection detail. It’s honestly just me, though. Yeah, I gotta watch Hammy every second of every minute of every day of the last six years. I was hired when he was just a Senator because even back then nobody liked him. I was fresh out of the police academy but found out I could make more in security. Wait, is there even a police academy at this time? Irrelevant, point is he’s my guy.
“No, Keith, I don’t got a smoke. I don’t even smoke. Nobody smokes but Hammy over there. You know what those things do to your body? Jesus, I’ve been throwing out his tobacco every chance I get. I mean, I’m supposed to protect him, right? It’s almost like he wants to die in office or something. So, no Keith, I don’t have no smoke.”
Keith Blackman stood up and towered over me in my chair like he was trying to scare somebody. Keith is a big, broad Negro gentlemen of Negro descent, so yeah, he is a little scary, but I’d never tell him that. He raised his hand like he might’ve actually lost his mind but instead rested it on my shoulder and chuckled as he sat down next to me. I scooted away, this chair isn’t that freaking big.
“Damn Beans, relax. How was Ham yesterday?” I scrubbed the toe of my left boot. “None worse than usual,” I said. Keith made a disgusted face at my boot. “Jeez that smells like butthole, bro. How bad did you have to do in the Police Academy to be stuck with this sorry ass job?”
I gave him a puzzled look. “Keith aren’t you a slave?” Keith’s jaw dropped. “Hey man not so loud, these are sensitive times right now. Yes my family was owned by Ham’s wife, but we just got freed, don’t make one of these old white guys around here change their mind, alright?” Keith quickly slipped out the room as Hammy started to stir. At first I thought he was about to vomit, but instead he let out a big yawn followed by the ugliest cough I’d ever heard.
“Beans, my man! What did we do last night? I don’t remember, but I guess that’s a sign we had some fun, right?” He was awfully chipper, almost like he didn’t spend the last two hours cleaning vomit out of his boots. Right, that was me. I sighed. “Well, Ham, if you recall, last night was your sister in law’s baby’s christening and reception. You wouldn’t think there was alcohol there, but somehow you got absolutely blitzed and stripped down to your underwear and peed in the holy water. Pastor Williams will send his bill later to help replace it and cover any emotional distress, and in return he’ll keep quiet about it.”
“Wow! That’s it?” Ham straightened up and started to pull his pants back on. “No,” I replied. “You also rolled around in the snow, yelled at all the maids to give you ‘Ham-jobs,’ and you vomited on my shoes as I carried you into your bed. That enough for you?” Ham just shrugged. “Wow, must’ve been some good communion wine, am I right?” He got up and went to the bathroom.
Ham isn’t always a drunk. Sometimes he’s a junky, a thrill seeker, and sometimes just a plain idiot. He’s funny sometimes. But more like how car crashes or syphilis is funny. In the right context, you need somebody to break the tension. And in these times, there’s a lot of tension, as you might assume. People are really on edge over the last snowstorm because the roads are really rough to ride over and horses keep turning their ankles on the dirt. I know, right? I didn’t even know that horses had ankles either, but they do and people are pissed off. General stores are completely low in supply in bandages and they can’t even order more because cotton production is way down because somebody freed all the people that spin cotton. I’m not against abolition or anything, my family was always too poor to have help to begin with. Also Keith is pretty cool, once you get past how mind numbingly stupid he is. His family’s great. I want a family. Wait I mean of my own, not just in my house working for free. God everybody’s so politically correct. Anyway, back to Ham, he’s a real handful. Ham’s a handful Ham’s a handful. That’s a tongue twister, ain’t it. Anyway, back to Hammy, he’s a lot. I’ll tell you what he did just over the last month.
One day I woke up and went to check on him like usual. I sleep in the adjoining room like a hotel suite so that I can watch him carefully because nobody trusts him. His wife was out with Keith running “errands.” Like any normal day at the Lincoln’s, I got up and brushed my teeth. I said my morning prayer that Ham would stop drinking and that a girl would one day find me handsome, so I’d have a reason to live other than taking care of Ham. I got up, knocked on Ham’s door calling, “Haaammyyy! You decent? Or at least your personal form of descent? Tighty-Whities with just enough hidden to avoid a misconduct charge?” I heard nothing. Not even groans or farts. “Got your clothes on or not? You awake?” I still heard nothing, so I used my key to his door and busted in. He wasn’t in bed, like I suspected, so I ran all around the house looking for him in his usual hiding spots. I checked the wine cellar, and then I checked the other wine cellar. Still nothing! I went back to the wine cellar, because you know, you can never be too careful with this guy, because he’s tall but closes up like a slinky. Then I had the idea to check outside. I went in the backyard to find our President in the pool at the bottom of the deep end with sandbags tied to his feet. I dove in the pool, untied the bags and dragged Hammy to the surface. I performed CPR on him until he coughed up enough water to rebreak the levies.
“Hammy! Why the hell were you under water with sandbags tied to you trying to drown yourself? I’d have thought if you were going to do the suicide thing, like you’d jump off the roof or pop something, not Ophelia your way out.”
Ham stood up and slapped me upside the head. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself you dumbass! I was trying to see how long I could hold my breath underwater!”
“What the—Hammy you would’ve died! You would’ve never found out how long you held your breath because you would’ve inhaled out of reflex or your lungs would’ve exploded!”
Ham walked off. “Well I guess I know what to do for next time!” He skipped off into the house leaving a trail of foot puddles behind him. I threw out the sandbags and went inside to make him some french toast. He deserved it, he had a rough morning.
A few days later I woke and did my normal routine of waking up Hammy, and again I found that he wasn’t in his bed where I left him. I went upstairs and the sky was falling. Not literally, but I felt something fall on my head and realized it was ceiling dust, whatever that is. The chandeliers(yeah, plural. Be jealous) were shaking and I gasped. “Ah, Christ! He’s on the roof!”
I ran outside and climbed up the drainpipes on the side of the house. Once I finished hoisting myself over the edge of the roof, I saw the most horrifying thing to ever exist up to 1865. Worse than when I found Ham gluing his fake beard on one morning. You never really know a guy until you see him in such a vulnerable state. No pun. Anyway, Hammy was riding a tricycle in his underwear across the roof!
I had to stop him, so I ran in front of him before he rode off the roof.
“Hammy what are you doing? Why are you riding a tricycle when your eight feet tall? Your knees are by your ears! Why are you in your underwear, again? It’s February!”
Hammy got up smiling in that winning candidate but clearly psychotic way we’re all familiar with. “Ha! I found my son’s old tricycle in the garage, but I just wanted to see if it still worked. I guess they were right when they say you never forget! Let’s get some lunch! Hey, hey Keith! Keith!”
Keith called up from the ground four stories below. “Yeah what’s up Hams?” “Keith can you make us some sandwiches? Because we’re friends and you make really good sandwiches. Not, you know, because you were a slave or anything.”
Keith put his thumbs up. “You got it Hams! I’ll make an extra one for myself too, because, you know, we’re friends!” Keith walked into the house.
Ham chuckled as he climbed downed the drainpipe. “Ah that Keith! He’s so fun, and my wife loves him. That’s how you know you got a food friend, when the wife is friends with him too. They’re together all the time! What a standup guy, entertaining her for hours, sometimes days at a time. Well, see you inside Beans!”
I just stared at him, and then my eyes drifted back over to the rusty tricycle, which sounds like a really nasty sex move. I walked over and started to clean it up the roof and write a letter to the roof repair guy that fixes the roof whenever Ham goes on the roof. He doesn’t get that the roof is not the floor, we’re not meant to be up here. He also doesn’t get that one bottle of rum is not the suggested serving size.
One night when we were carriage riding into town because Ham wanted to get a few grocery items, we rode for like ten minutes south of our neighborhood, and Hammy told the rickshaw to stop at the corner. Hammy hopped out of his seat saying “give me five minutes. If I’m not back by then, find Keith.” I scratched my head trying to figure out if this was a test or not. I knew that I shouldn’t let him go off by himself, but he’d been bugging me all week and I was tired, so I mumbled half asleep, “alright Ham, but hurry back.” Yeah that was a mistake.
Ham put up his hood(yeah don’t ask) and walked down an alley. I watched from inside the ride for a minute. He waited there for a second, and I guess he heard something, so he turned another corner out of the ally and disappeared. I waited for a couple of minutes and realized this was ridiculous, so I jumped out and slowly walked down the alley only to find Ham whispering to some young white kid with a bottle in a bag. They were arguing about a price of some sort, and then I realized what this was.
“Ham!” I screamed. “Ham, are you buying morphine???” They both looked up at me, and the kid with the bottle ran away. Ham cursed.
“Damn it, Beans! All of my friends have tried it already! I just got some new needles and everything. We are just negotiating the price was all, but of course you had to come and ruing everything, like always. Oh, Beans I’m pissed now. When we get home, you better have some morphine for me!” I walked him back to the ’shaw and that was the end of it. By the time we got back home, he was asleep snoring sucking his thumb, drool all over his fake beard. I carried him inside over my shoulder, changed his clothes and his facial hair, and put him to bed.
One afternoon I went downstairs to fetch his dementia medication because duh, and I sat down for a couple of minutes because again, I was exhausted. Then, all of a sudden, a knife fell through the ceiling, inches away from impaling my left foot. I just shook my head this time, because I honestly couldn’t get mad again. I’ve been practicing a lot of deep breathing lately because my doctor says my blood pressure is a little high and I got this new thing they discovered called hypertension. All of the slaves have it. I picked up the knife, sighed, and walked up stairs to the kitchen to find Ham tossing knifes in the air one by one trying to catch them, but narrowly dodging them as they came crashing to the floor. I set the knife that almost killed me down on the counter. “Ham,” I said rubbing my forehead. “Ham why are you doing whatever you’re doing with knives?” Ham shrugged. “I saw this juggler doing this at my daughter’s birthday party, and I thought, I’m the most powerful man in the world, I should be able to juggle knives, right?”
Before he got the chance to toss another blade in the air, I quick ran over to him and snatched the knives away from him. “What,-” he tried to protest, but I waived him off and walked away, hiding the knives.
The next day I caught him drinking expired milk. He spent the entire day vomiting in the bathroom, and by now I had given up on him. It’s hard watching him do stuff like this, as if it’s always my job to value his life more than he does, but I guess that’s true. That’s my guy. Soon I got him cleaned up and ready to go. We were scheduled to go to a local play that Ham had already agreed to go to. Me, he, his wife and Keith all loaded into the ’shaw and headed to the theater. We got our tickets and sat in the balcony. Before the play started, Ham called me over.
“Beans, I got some bad news. My family hasn’t been happy with things lately, with all of the trouble I’ve been getting into, if you haven’t noticed. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been messing up a lot more, and they can’t understand why. They think it could be the pressure of the war or the campaign, but either way, I almost died like 37 times. I told them that the only thing that’s changed is that we hired you. We’ve decided to let you go and give Keith your job. Keith’s so likeable and my wife and kids love him. Also, with that new amendment and all, giving him a job would cut the black unemployment rate in half. Don’t take this personally, Beans, your country thanks you for your service. You are dismissed.”
I was shocked.This was the last thing I had ever expected to happen.I dedicated six years to this man!I loved him like he was myself, no. Better than myself, and this was the thanks I got!I walked away as the play started, everybody ignoring me as if I weren’t even there.Keith and Mrs. Lincoln(I honestly don’t know her name) were holding hands and other things under the seat.I thought about exposing him, but Keith never did anything to me, it’s not his fault that everybody likes him.No, I know whose fault this is.I stopped at the exit and turned around, pulling my gun out of my holster for the first time in six years.I calmly raised it, cocked it aimed, and stopped.Should I do this?Yeah.I was about to pull the trigger, but instead, I walked out and went home.I packed my bags and took a boat to South America.I decided to live for myself for the first time.I became a farmer, met some great guys, got a girlfriend.Things worked out.I wonder what every happened with Hammy.He’s probably doing just fine.Start writing here…
