Free Final Stroke by Michael Beres Page A

Washington and was handed down. A congressman farts at the podium and the next thing you know there’s another new rule and another new form to fill out. They cut down trees in the boondocks to make paper while turn ing a river into something that burns, then they ship the paper to Chi cago where printing presses three stories tall spit out ten-part forms, then they ship the forms here to Hell in the Woods to be filled out, then, even though they put the data on computers, they ship the forms to Washington so the farting congressman will have a bundle of them before next election to hold up and shake in the air while he complains about government waste like he’s the first to discover it.
    Tyrone checked his watch again, then stretched his long arms into the air and almost touched the ceiling. Maybe his daddy had been a basketball player. That’s what the doc at the retard school said in so many words back when he was a kid with such big hands he could hold onto the basketball with one hand when he was only twelve, even though he couldn’t play worth a damn. He overheard the doc say ing to another doc, who’d stopped by for a shot of morphine, that his daddy and ma were probably cousins. But the doc said first cousins and he knew damn well that wasn’t true. Second or third maybe, but not first. Maybe the doc let him overhear on purpose because all it took was to hear that doc saying his daddy and ma were cousins and the next thing he knew he was out of retard school, graduating from high school and getting his first job down at Cook County Hospital where he learned the health care ropes.
    Yeah, learned real fast that the health care system was a thing put there to make sure most of the money funneled on up to the docs, and to the drug company executives, and to the supply company execu tives. Everybody with fists full of forms to make sure all the money was correctly earmarked so the docs and company executives wouldn’t stop buying second homes, because in Washington the fart at the po dium didn’t want to see housing start figures take a nosedive.
    After hustling laundry at Cook County Hospital for a couple years, Tyrone moved on to the VA Hospital on the west side where it seemed half the patients suffered from one thing or another having to do with smoking cigarettes since they were PFCs with Betty Grable pinups thumb-tacked to their bunks. His job there was to deliver clean spit-up cups and take away used spitted-up cups. Even though most of the guys at the VA were white, the stuff in those cups made it seem like they were slowly turning black on the inside. One theory he developed while working at the VA was that just before white people die they turn black inside and finally feel how it is to be black, but they also realize it’s too late for this realization to do any good and they die hollering and screaming to the Almighty to let them live even if they have to suffer like black folks. He heard plenty of hollering and screaming at the VA and sometimes wondered if part of the purpose of the system was to turn everyone who didn’t own at least two condos into niggers.
    A while back, when he told Latoya about his theory, she was duly impressed. They’d just done a couple rounds on her living room floor, being that her roommate was out, and while they got dressed she told him just how impressed she was.
    “There best be no bruises on me from those big old hands of yours. You hear what I’m sayin’? There any bruises back here? What about there?”
    “No, babe, there ain’t no bruises. Anyhow, who’d see ‘em on you?”
    “You sayin’ I’m too black for you? That what you sayin’?”
    “No, babe, I ain’t sayin’ that.”
    At this point he told Latoya it didn’t really matter how black a person was, or even how white for that matter, because in the end we all end up turning black inside. He told about the dying VA hospital guys and about his theory that everyone eventually turns into a nigger in