The Narrative of Allen Ginsberg PI, Part ONE

Those big Nazi bastards blew my brains out at dawn last Christmas. They burst into the room while I was trimming the mayor and cut loose with their Uzis. Sometimes you imagine your own death. You think of falling out of a tree house in soiled underwear. Or drowning in sludge with an anvil on your chest. Or getting crushed in a hog stampede at the county fair. But you never think you’ll get strafed out to tarnation while circumcising the mayor of a small Southern town. Shit happens, especially when the flush isn’t working and you’ve run out of asswipes.

I saw it coming. I mean I saw the bullet coming. It was just a black dot at first. Then it was a purple lozenge in phallic extension. Then it was a bronze shark-head looming gape-mouthed. I felt it tear through, felt it explode in cranial orgasm. When you get shot that way you stay shot. When your brains get blown out to palookaville they stay blown. And yet here I am a year later, live and intact, my brains back where they’re meant to be. How’d that happen? Don’t ask me. Ask Gyani if you ever find him, which you won’t.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead, right to the end. I ought to introduce myself first. My name’s Allen Ginsberg and I’m a thirty-three year old private investigator here in Snowdrop. There’s not much call for PI’s in this town but I became one anyway. On my thirtieth birthday I nailed a signboard to a picket and stuck it out by the porch steps of my new office. Back then the sign read: ALLEN GINSBERG, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Now it reads: ANUS GIN, PIT GATOR, some letters erased, a couple added.

I didn’t damage my own sign, natch. It was vandalized a while back, I really ought to get it fixed right off, soon, sometime, never. There’s no shortage of vandals in Snowdrop, ragass hillbillies looking to mangle or destroy. I pretty much know who messed up my sign but it doesn't matter. I can understand why they did what they did. In a town this small, this deep in the boonies, you have to get creative to stay amused. You have to push the envelope, go off the beaten track. That’s what I did. I pushed my beaten envelope and became a PI three years back. On my thirtieth birthday.

Three years isn’t very long career-wise but maybe it’s long enough for me. I’m not sure I want to be a PI anymore. I’m not sure of anything, if truth be told. Not after what I went through last December. That four-day ordeal before Christmas. Dying in hail of bullets Chirstmas day. I’ve been trying to forget it all, I really have. I’ve been working to push it to the back of my mind, make it hazy and distant. But I can’t. It’s still clear, every last bit of it. Vivid as a child’s nightmare. Sometimes I wonder if it really happened. Maybe it was a prolonged acid flash, I tell myself. A four day mescaline dream.

But that’s just wishful thinking. It was real alright. It’s never a mind trip when you want it to be. It happened sure as shit on diapers and I’m still trying to live it down, a year later. I think maybe I’m going to spend the rest of my life living it down. The Bale County Almanac listed me for the first time last month, under ‘P’ for Private Eye. I guess that makes it official, pretty cool in a way, but you won’t catch me celebrating. That mangled signboard out there says it all. It pretty much looks like I feel.

***

When I say I became a PI I mean I just decided I was one and stuck a signboard where people could see it. I’m not a true blue card-carrying gumshoe, a dick trained in the usual methods of detection. I’d be at a real disadvantage if I were. The usual methods wouldn’t work in this town. Down here, your rational approach would put you on a fast track to the nearest nuthouse. Suddenly you’re in a padded cell gnawing on a droolcup, insisting you’re Cleopatra.

That’s no excuse for operating without a license but around here no one gives a damn, least of all Billy Rain. Billy Rain’s the sheriff of Bale County, whatever the hell that means. No one knows how he became sheriff, or even what his job entails. He wears a wide brim khaki hat, drives around in a battered cruiser and chews Red Man baccy. That’s good enough for most.

I guess I’m the closest thing to a sheriff’s deputy. Or was. Billy Rain used to call on me about once every month, till last December. Gon need your swingin dick oane this one, he’d say, through a mouthful of baccy. Be right over, I’d say, after I’m through with my nap. For me, every call from Billy Rain counted as a PI gig. Most of those gigs were trivial but we worked some good ones.

One time we busted a clique of hillbillies who liked messing with farm hogs in tubs of soggy bonemeal. They’d gotten someone to film their rollicks, a movie called Hog Hump Happy Hour. Billy and I trashed their game, nabbed them on two counts: illicit sexual congress and misuse of farm equipment. Billy still calls me once a month but I don’t respond. Can’t. I’m too busy recovering from last Christmas.

I didn’t always partner up with Billy. Sometimes he handed me gigs he was too busy to work himself. The Driessen case for instance. Norm Driessen’s a farmer who grows genetically modified corn on a plot of land outside Snowdrop. He visited his folks in Philadelphia one summer, married a distant cousin and returned home with his bride. Trouble was, the bride refused to sleep with him or even touch him anywhere except this one spot under his left armpit.

At first he figured maybe she was shy and religious the way Amish chicks tend to be before they wig out and go porno. But before long he got desperate and called on Billy who called on me. I’ll need to skulk around the farmhouse and take pictures, I said, pictures of Norm’s wife. Do what you have to, Billy said. We need to know what’s goin on.

I took some pretty useful ones as it turned out. Useful pictures. They showed a neanderthal with a buzz cut, missing eye-teeth and a nonexistent brow. The clincher was a close-up of outsize male genitalia and absent mammaries. Norm’s wife was titless and hung like a bear. Which is to say, Norm’s wife was a husband. He was disappointed with the findings, Norm, but not disappointed enough. He’s still married to the hump.

I also worked some Missing Persons cases for Billy. There was this preacher who went missing a couple years back. He checked into a local motel, left all his personal effects under the bed and vanished. So Billy Rain rounded up a search party and asked me to assist. You know these hills better’n the back o’ your ass, he said. If you cain’t find the sumbitch no one can. I did find him as it turned out. I found the preacher dead on the hillside two days later. He’d been savaged almost beyond recognition, his entrails draped over a dwarf pine. We all knew who’d done it: Elmer the East Yazoo Wolfman.

Elmer’s our local werewolf, a harmless schmuck though scary-looking in his polka-dot cassock, bubble-plastic brogans and cedar-bark busby. All Elmer ever does is bark at the moon, feed on cicadas and hump possum. He’s shy for a country werewolf, won’t mess with you if you don’t mess with him. But the preacher HAD messed with him as it turned out. He’d tried to spook the wolf out him with a hide-bound bible, an emerald crucifix, a black scorpion and a fresh lemon peel. Elmer had retaliated the only way he knew how: display mutilation. Cain’t arrest a wolfman for defendin himself, said Billy Rain, so we buried the preacher where we found him and left it at that.

It was fun while it lasted. Working with Billy Rain, doing the small-town PI thing. I should’ve remained content with that, but I didn’t. I started to lose my bearings, suffer delusions of grandeur. I started comparing myself to other PI’s in Bale County, guys like Big Ed Klytemnestra and Johnny ‘Jizzboy’ Johanssen and Perdido Centavos. I’m not as good as they are, I thought, but I could be. A major gig is what I need, a humdinger that’ll grow hair on my chest, that’ll make me feel like my life means something. I got what I wanted, sure enough. A big, nasty Christmas gift, a yuletide kick in the nuts. My old man used to say: be careful what you wish for, it might give you the drizzling shits. I should’ve listened.