“I had built a craven image to myself out of upcycled condoms and semen and I crushed it with one blow.”

—an excerpt from Confession of a Lint Head, page 347

It was another night at the Back Alley, and another night of pissing Red Hots in the piss trough next to skateboard trannies and spendthrift gigolos. I was thinking about Jessica White.

I had left Jessica back at my house. She was sprawled out on my couch, fingering her prickly sarlacc pit, and begging me to fuck her with a bowling trophy I’d bought at a garage sale. I had pulled it from a box that the rats had turned into a double-wide trailer and I had never washed it. It just sat on the mantle and mocked Jessica White and her gaping maw. When I got back from the Back Alley, I ended up letting her dry hump my right knee while I burned another bowl of lint. Then I made hate to her face and blew a load as she blew her nose. And then I impregnated her with her own snot and a case of MRSA.

Not that she would care. I was Wyatt Duvall, and I had a full bag of lint in my pocket and everyone knew it. My face was plastered on laundromats around town. It was tough enough getting through a single piss-trough piss without one yahoo after another trying to get my dick in his mouth. One particular doe-eyed teen with a fake ID and a hair lip and a stubble of zits had snuck in when I was dreaming. He dropped to his knees in front of me and said, “Trick or treat,” as he reached for my cock. The urine splashed off the piss trough breath mint and onto his glasses. “Bah humbug,” I replied and kicked him away and then rubbed the pus from a burst ball sack sore across his forehead. Judging by his complexion, he was used to it.

An hour later, he was giving me head by the dumpster behind the Back Alley. I checked my hiding hole in the wall, the one where I had hidden lint years before and I found a weathered baggy. Surprisingly, the lint inside was still fresh. I smoked.

And it was then that I realized that I had made it back. I had fallen. I had crawled on my hands and knees across the craggy asphalt we call life and I had come out on top. I had done something that few people had ever done. Every junk-sick low life and every chemotherapy drag queen and every sex-traffick teen runaway loved me, but I didn’t love me.

Nope.

I idolized me.

I had built a craven image to myself out of upcycled condoms and semen and I crushed it with one blow. I composed hymn after hymn after every broken hymen to the wonder of my cherry-popping brilliance. I wrote a doctoral thesis on the circumference of my ego and a requiem for all of my jerky sheet cum stains. I was a motherfucking national holiday. And that was fucking enough.

Two days later, the zit-faced teen OD’ed on dryer lint. In his honor, I ran his briefs through the dryer until they disintegrated into dust while Jessica White was on the couch doing a 7-10 split with a bowling trophy covered in rat shit.