Noah Cicero - The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I

I left the cafeteria and walked down the street. While walking I saw a homeless woman covertly pull down her pants and piss on one of the big bank buildings.

I laughed and walked on.

While I lived in San Diego, I stayed in a small boarding house.

I lived in a decent-sized room with Tom, the kid from New Zealand.

The room had two single beds, a closet and a sink with a small mirror, and a television with cable.

We had to share a kitchen and a bathroom with the other renters.

Through this sharing I met the other people who lived there.

The person who ran the boarding house was named Alex.

He was an ex-marine who fought in Vietnam and got shot.

Then he was a cop and got shot there too.

Then for someone reason got involved in doing drugs and got shot twice while doing that.

He loved to show people his bullet wounds.

He was very proud of them.

Alex also had an obsession with weapons. The office he worked in had ninja swords, guns, bows, and knives all over the walls.

He would show Tom and I his real expensive guns and swords all the time.

He was also obsessed with buying shit off of eBay like gold rings, necklaces, and tons of golden shit. That is also where he got his guns.

He would buy really expensive shit every day, which didn’t make sense to Tom and I because he lived so cheaply and was so white trash.

We asked him about it one day and he said that back in the mid-nineties, he threw a bunch of money in Microsoft stock and made a shitload and immediately pulled it out.

Alex would sit all night in his room and watch porn.

And I mean all night.

The boarding house didn’t have air-conditioning, so the windows would stay open all night.

Alex’s window was on the first floor.

Every time Tom and I walked by his window at night, we could see porn on his television through the window.

There was a guy who everybody called the Chaplain.

Everybody called him the Chaplain because he claimed that he was a chaplain in the Navy for twenty years.

No one believed him though. He was completely insane.

The Chaplain had no job. Like most people in the boarding house, he got money from the government for being nuts.

The Chaplain would always start talking about God to you while you were cooking in the kitchen, not Christian Republican God talk, but his own cracked version of it. It would usually go like this: “See, God is like a flower.

“Delicate and beautiful.

“God, you know, made the universe from rocks and dust from an alien spaceship.

“Sometimes when I touch myself I feel that God wants me to.

“God doesn’t want me to go to the mall.

“He knows how drunk I get when I become the Godhead and swim the thousand oceans of the devil and slithering snakes of shit and gargoyle breath.

“My brother once jammed a stick in my anus and God told me He did that to test me.

“God sent birds to attack my mother.

“God is going to return and take me to heaven to sit beside Him on the throne.”

The Chaplain was insane.

At night he would sit at a desk till five in the morning, working.

Tom and I assumed it was on some strange long manuscript that resembled the word salad schizophrenic shit he would tell us while we were in the kitchen.

It gets weirder than that.

The whole time he worked at night, he wore a t-shirt pushed back on his head, kind of like a nun’s habit.

The Chaplain was a madman.

With no apparent purpose but to do nothing and annoy people.

He was completely nuts and no one wanted him around.

There was an Islamic black girl named Fatima.

She wore soft dresses that covered her arms and legs.

She also wore a hijab that covered her hair.

She was attractive and very strange.

Fatima was married to some guy Tom and I never saw.

Fatima said that her husband had another wife and that he spent most of his time with her.

His other wife had the kids and took care of the nice house.

You got the impression she was his hot young wife that he supported and fucked for fun.

Fatima had no real problem with that.

Her husband paid her bills and gave her spending money.

I assumed Fatima took that deal because she was so fucked up in the head she couldn’t work anywhere without getting fired within two weeks.

So it was like SSI without having to fuck around with the government.

On top of the boarding house, there was a roof with a deck where you could sit and look at downtown San Diego.

Fatima used to sit up there with us a lot.

She would tell us about her life before she was a Muslim.

She used to date a guy from Colombia who was involved in the drug trade, her mother was a Baptist preacher, she never knew her father and she used to do coke.

She was homeless when she was fifteen years old.

Sometimes she would do her prayers in front of us.

She would wash her arms, feet, legs, hands, and then pray to Allah.

Tom and I would stare at her, wondering what the hell she was doing.

It was obvious that she became Islamic because the world had taken too many shits on her head and Islam gave her a perfect escape from that.

The Muslims consistently gave her money, a place to stay, food, and filled her mind full of campy fantasies about heaven and some antichrist character with one eye.

As far as Tom and I could see, it was all one giant act to escape reality.

She had no interest in heaven; her main interest was shelter, food, and escape from the misery of her life.

There were two more strange characters living in the boarding house.

One was a thirty-something black guy and the other was a forty-something woman.

I don’t recall their names.

All I remember about them is that the woman would give Tom and I food that tasted like shit.

She would give us refried beans that were three days old and leftover fried chicken. It was all disgusting.

Well, this is what happened one time with them.

I was alone in the kitchen making some Ramen noodles.

I was standing there waiting for them to be done.

They came into the kitchen and faced me like they were going to talk to me.

I looked at them, waiting to hear what absurd shit they were going to say to me.

“We would like to know if you would have sex with both of us at the same time,” said the woman.

I looked at them and thought of that famous Hunter S. Thompson quote: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

“I’ll do it for five hundred dollars apiece,” I said.

“We don’t got five hundred dollars apiece,” said the woman.

“That’s my offer.”

“Come on man, just some sex,” said the black guy.

“You obviously don’t have money. I’m gonna get my Ramen, go upstairs, and eat it.”

I got my Ramen and walked past them.

The black guy looked heartbroken.

I was very flattered.

After I got home from San Diego, I got some money and went to see a childhood friend graduate from the Marines.

I went with another friend who knew him.

His name was Carl.

A nice guy. Short, stocky, very friendly, very nervous.

We got to the base and went to the graduation ceremony.

We sat in the stands with all the proud parents in hot-and-humid-as-fuck South Carolina in August.

It was hot, muggy, and just fucking ugly there.

We sat in the stands for a long time.

Then about a thousand Marines started marching out.

They marched perfectly.

All in a straight line.

All taking synchronized steps.

It was fucking insane.

Then some man yelled and they all stopped perfectly at the same time.