His name was cockeyed Junior. He lived in Nebraska out in the woods on a farm where things didn’t grow. The animals were frighten by him, even the pigs. He had this absurd crazy off-centered and drunken look about himself. He chewed on a stick of straw all day and all night like a horse until his teeth rot. When he didn’t chew straw he chewed tobacco. Junior carried a nasty spit can in his back pocket. He wore filthy overalls with no shirt and no underwear. He worked out in the field and would sweat and smelt like a pig on a moist day. He would chopped wood every morning because it had gotten cold mostly at night. He had a head full of hair but he wore it wild which made him look cynical and sinister.
Junior looked a little like that nigger boy who played in that movie “Glory”, you know who I’m talkin’ about. The one who carried the flag. The stupid, backwoods country boy. The one with the fucked up crazy eye that went every whicha away. Yeah, that one.
Big ole Junior lived with his mother, father, brother and sister in a two room log cabin. They didn’t have electricity in the house either. The electric didn’t reach that far. Junior’s family didn’t have a bathroom. They used an outhouse to do their business. When he did wear a pair of pants they were high waters, nothing but bob socks and ankles swimming in the air. The sight of it would just crack me up. Junior’s head was shaped like a bullet. People called him bullet head Junior. nobody knew which eye was Junior’s good eye. nobody had the sense to ask him. Everybody was afraid of him because he did time in prison. He served 15 years for smiling at a white woman. When he was in prison he ran the chain gang. Ole Junior was cock strong. He used to lift cows and milk them at the same time. He was fast too. Faster than two Jackrabbits.
Cockeyed Junior
There’s nothing more healing than the human touch. Have you ever seen the expression on a man’s face after the woman of his dreams enters a room? From head to toe she became Juniors delicious human fruit rollup. So succulent she would make his mind and mouth water. I have to admit, she was jaw dropping and eye popping. He was in love with a sweet and beautiful frosted pop tart. A freckle face redhead. Her name was Kate. They called her Carrot Cake Kate. I called her Carrot Top cause she’d always wore her hair in a frizzy ponytail. Bugs Bunny would have tore her no havin’ behind up. She was skinny as a stick and suffered from a decease called, “noassatall” syndrome. Nobelt had been invented at the time to save her. Her pants would just fall right off her because she didn’t have a backside to hold up her pants. That’s why she switched to wearing skirts and dresses. In fact, her entire family had the decease. When she came around Junior, he got quite. Still like. So quite you could hear a field mouse piss on cotton.
Now Junior wasn’t wrapped too tight, you see. He wasn’t the sharpest blade in the tool box. He was dull like his momma. I think his momma dropped him several times before. When she first dropped him, Junior would bounce right up. The last time she dropped him, Junior didn’t jump back up right away. He kinda just laid there then got up real slow. He been slow ever since. His daddy didn’t think Junior was his son, cause the boy didn’t look nothin’ like him. He looked more like Jed Wilkinson who picked cotton in the fields last year for Mr. Jenkins. Jed got that crazy eye gene too.
I was scared for the boy because I thought one day Junior’s father would kill him. His father would hit Junior so hard it would feel like I was the one who had gotten hit. I mean hard, he would hit him on a Friday but the effects of the blow would last until it felt like it was a cloudy Monday. He would beat Junior’s ass as if he really wanted to beat his own wife. Hmm. Come to think about it, they never found Jed’s body. Anyway, I told that boy Mr. Jenkins didn’t like any foolishness with his daughter. Especially, coming from our kind. But Junior was hardheaded and hard of hearing, too. That’s when they found him out back swinging from an Oak tree. Junior must have been scared straight because when they found him his eyes were no longer crossed.
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Harlem Inner City Blues: Random Thoughts 