The Dying Man Tribune

Shampoo shopping late one night, the guy whom I knew only as the Hairy Coughing Man from my apartment building of otherwise faceless young professionals stared me dead in the eyes and tossed a box of Magnums into his CVS basket. He arched his eyebrows (a nest of dusty black computer cords animated by a flailing rat in the middle) as if to say something daring but instead of words, came phlegm. Then blood. Then employees. Mops. I just stood there. My existence seemed to conjure up the blood and the mops and maybe being some kind of witch who made dirty old men explode in the middle of the night at a CVS was better than being whatever the hell I really was.

“I could fuck you 100 times and never get bored,” he says, a pellet of unknown phlegm still dangling from his lower lip.

“I… have a boyfriend,” I lie.


“I fuck to create pillows for my death bed,” he replies.

“I’m… your neighbor. Are you okay?”

His eyes screw up in pain. I’m not supposed to ask.

“You must be hornier than me to still be standing there. Let’s go.”

What can I say? He made the right assumptions, the ones I wanted people to make about me, and left the rest untouched. So I would do the same for him. It was understood. He would salivate, I would demure. Everybody wins on the walk to the cashier.

“Our whole fuckathon will be chalked up in two months. And that’s why you’re the luckiest one in my whole chain of fools,” he says. I would learn later that “chain of fools” was another term he used to refer to his “nation of exes.”

“You will only get the best of me. After two months, I go sour, you see? After two months, I always go bad. Which is why I never go past two… But with you, neighbor, the divine timing is built in. You’ll never have to  see me go bad on you because in two months I’ll be gone. It’s perfect! Jimmy Komma. Your name?”

“Madeline.”  

His apartment smells like Elmer’s glue. The largest wall of the living room is dedicated to his own personal photography. Hundreds of women hang there, twisting themselves into gelatinous poses, or as close as Jimmy could get them to it. Even the shy ones appear invitingly whorish when they are stuck to drywall with glue that warps each photo in such a way as to bend them over in just the right spot. Jimmy explains to me his Subtle Art of Where To Dollop The Glue to Get this Effect Just Right, hands me a drink.

He collapses onto a denim couch caked in ashes and surrounded by portraits of himself from long ago. “Painters always had a kink for me,” Jimmy repeats several times.The wall not dedicated to Jimmy’s erotic portraits is dedicated to Jimmy’s so-called famous friends. Only the most random of 1990s celebrities. “I never had much of a career path…” he offers. But in LA, he claims he was what is still known today as, “around,” meaning he had enough social currency thanks to his handsomeness (which still haunts his face) to become someone if he ever wanted to, but lacked the ambition to spend this currency on anything besides pussy, as Jimmy puts it, punctuated by his thunder clap laugh that gets all the dogs in the building howling. The stench of Elmers reminds me of childhood and I envision sunny afternoons spent hiding with my shadowy dog deep inside his den.

The rule becomes that Jimmy is permitted to make one sexual pass at me per day. It keeps him happy. My rejections sometimes get him laughing so hard that he disappears coughing inside the bathroom for an entire episode of Columbo. Then he comes out with black blood all over his shirt and tries again. We laugh our asses off.

Jimmy is fascinated not by my writing so much as the fact that I write and can potentially draw him one last portrait of himself. “I’m no painting anymore, let’s face it, right? But maybe I can be a book…” I am saddened by the proposition because it reminds me that my afternoons hidden inside Jimmy’s pussy museum will soon end. Sandwiches, cigarettes, him watching me lie on his carpet, the feeling of being watched by him while lying on his carpet, wasn’t it enough?

Jimmy knew every emotional combination possible between man and woman, especially during their first two months of sexual infatuation, after which he admittedly got foggy. But he knew that one stretch of time the way some guys know certain highways. Fucking was the ancient game which Jimmy alone had mastered. Or so we joked. But jokes lead to bits. Bits lead to dynamics. Jimmy was better left inside of his own illusions.  So when he told me he planned to write the book himself for me to edit, a how-to book for getting laid, I told him it sounded like God’s plan to make us both rich and gifted him with a notebook and pen. He demanded a deadline so I said, anytime before you croak oughta work, but he didn’t take that joke as I had wanted.



My Book - Chapter One - by Jimmy Komma


I fuck to create pillows for my death bed. Every fuck is a lollipop to suck later when I will need to relieve the pain of Gods presence as he evicts my own. I could never come enough to satisfy my mother. My mother needed every drop for her buckets. She would churn it with period into a wine using her feet. But she could not outrun. The wine is what finally killed her. Not just literal wine and not just literal death, but those too. White and sugary stuff, mamas lollipop. For me, her eldest, most upright citizen of a son it is smoke, it is pussy. All kinds of smoke, any kinds of pussy. Money and success are only a means to this end. I smoke my mothers pussy and I smoke that till the end.



Jimmy admittedly lacked a certain type of brains and it is, in fact, impossible to even imagine him thinking. He told me once about a jazz musician who was so prone to playing that he eventually became played by his own sax. “That is the story of me and my cock,” Jimmy coughed. And it was, right up until the end too. The more hospital morphine dripped into him, the more that thing refused to cower down…and the more time I started to spend inside my own apartment. I wanted to give Jimmy a chance with the new nurses, I told myself. But the truth is that it hadn’t even been two months and he was already going bad. Not in the way that he had gone bad for the others. I would never know how he had gone bad for those others (the search record revealed only lawsuits from the California welfare department) but I can assure you it was better than what I saw. A mean streak would have been welcome. What I saw was just plain going bad, the way things inside the refrigerator go bad.

Jimmy never asked me take him to doctor appointments and for this I was grateful. I started planning my visits to happen only during his sleeping hours. The stench of Elmer’s had been replaced by piss pans and spices from the Filipino nurses who complained about the pens I gave him. His pillows had been scrawled during the night with words which, when mixed with his night sweats, bled into clouds of blue staining everything, mostly Jimmy.  I could make out the names of various girls shimmering in the center of these sheetstains but didn’t point them out to the nurses. They wore crosses so I made up a story about a church and didn’t return for several weeks. I couldn’t leave my apartment any more than Jimmy could. I began gluing pictures up on my own walls. I hunted down the box which was kept in the back of my closet and let the photos fall like bombs to my carpet. Pictures of the Damned. But none more damned than that smiling, old me in the middle.



My Book Chapter 2 by Jimmy Komma

You wanted a sexual how-to. None of this has been taught to me. The knowledge exists inside of me as plasma. I would have written a book if I had any clue myself and probably make a fortune. Instead, I am stranding you with the ramblings of a dying man who acts he knows not how to achieve something he knew very fucking damn well. Instincts exist inside of all Gods creatures and we must listen to them, they are calling us, they are asking us to be ourselves. You don’t hear toxic flowers complaining about killing others. You don’t hear them panning their own hearts in therapy. They take what they are and they run. It cannot be taught.

The only thing to remind the dying man of his future is the nipple. The only way to revive a dying heart is to make it jealous. The only way to make a girl squirt is triceps. The only deathbed is the one you didn’t fuck in and mine is marinated. So there’s your knowledge.

I’ll play the teacher, I’ll play the cad, I’ll play the romantic lad, but only I know what I really am. “There will be no more hypnosis!" I command to myself in the mirror. Problem is, that can’t be my face. This isn’t my mirror. And I haven’t heard from the One I Need in days, weeks, months? She will not call me back. Which can only mean bad things for my Big Night. My big night is buttfucked under the moon if I don’t do something quick. So I call them up. All of them. I call them to memory. They are there. All my girls. My beautiful, wonderful…


The nurses took it upon themselves to deliver Jimmy’s notes to me since I was just upstairs. They seemed to take pleasure in seeing me avoid him. It gave them a feeling of superior courage, even if they did get paid double to work in pairs due to Jimmy’s “banana tantrums.”


MY BOOK CHAPTER 3!!! BY J K

After age 35, something happened… Actually, two things happened at the exact same time. The first seeds of death sprout inside my guts and every 22ish year old girl within 100 mile radius seems to emerge from shadows and rivers as wet, activated agents. They smell ripened confidence, its skin is now ready for their consumption. They want to meet your cock now swollen with dead dreams and throbbing for revenge against Time. The girls do not mean to hurt but they cannot help either. They are acting only on account of Earth and its insistence on circles. Many mens brains become broken by such bitches but not mine, because I never fight back. You cannot break what gives. You can never say no. You can be useful, in the grand scheme of things, a rotting fruit which produces a special fungus for bunnies to chew.

I am 78 years old but when I call them up, I can be whatever age I want. When everyone else started families I said no, this is my talent, this is my fate, bring me bunnies. The thing nobody tells you about Gods path is that it’s always right under your nose. People want it to be some faraway thing. You think God gets a kick out of the main character not bearing witness to the disintegration of his own soul? No. God wants you thrashing through the pulp and wondering which side you are even on. What do you want when you watch entertainment? Listen to his Obviousness. It wasn’t easy for me - I once had morals too - but I did it.

Now I am scented by a potpourris of pussy pillows and I am not ashamed. You wanted to know the secrets to my success. This is your first lesson, boys. I’m telling you this for the sake of the women who want to love you, who want you to turn them on. You are failing them. Learn to spank, learn to yank, cop to your own timidity and maybe we can become acquainted. Maybe I will bequeath will and testament to my dear friend Madeline who for some reason is not calling me back.

So. Let’s take my current situation as an example of how-to and maybe you’ll hear something. Maddie has been missing her appointments. Am I going to call you, Maddie? Some of these pick-up books will tell you not to call Madeline. No! You call Madeline. Dying or not, you call her repeatedly. You let her know that you’re going to die (dying or not) and you need one last kiss from her in order to channel all the women who came before, who shoot through Madeline’s sour little mouth into your heart one last time before the end. She will come over when she hears this. Because it’s the truth. I cannot pretend it’s any other way. And if that’s not how you feel, you’ll never thrive. Get married. Have the kids. There is no such thing as teachable talent. There is hardly even such a thing as talent. There are only red holes screaming to be whitened. Drench them and lift as the viscous mystic for a few seconds into something better… feel relieved. Feel afloat.

You are witnessing the top of Maddie's head as it bobs into your periphery. She showed up? Why is she sucking me off  in periphery? You should be looking down at her. You should be looking up ... at her? Why am I on the ceiling? Why is Maddie screaming “dead dick!”? She is insulting me on my death bed. She didn’t even finish. She is spoiling my big night. But oh. LOOK AT THAT. Maddie is evicted by a swarm of angels from my past who have memorized the map of my sweet spots. These angels form like North Korean swans into a seventy-sided cloud of cherubic pussy petals.

I float like steam from my failed body into a phantom of cerulean cocks swirling like a wheel of fortune spun too fast Blue sparks fly as I levitate into the puzzle of my destiny, my many pussied final pillow I have never seen Her before but I have felt Her always She has been waiting for me, praying along that I will do the right things I have done the right things My many-cocked specter locks into place. 2001 space stuff All the cocks enter their cubbies before take off Every inch of Her quilt is a bullseye But one last little cock remains

Orphaned, he is only 12. Everybody — all the cocks and pussies — look around to each other like, “Is this kid gonna die?” Which only frightens baby. I ride my sack down to him for a closer inspection to see if there’s any way we might sneak him aboard our Great Ship.

Big mistake. The baby blue penis is too resigned of his fate. He cannot meet my eyes. He seems to know something I don’t. The boy starts to cry really bad. All the cocks roll eyes. The pussies petals all curl, but not in the way that is good. “There there,” I say to the little cock roach. “You aren’t gonna be left behind. You’re with me. You’re with Jimmy.” “No, I’m not.” “Why not?” “I cannot be.” “You cannot be what?” “Remembered.”

He screams something about the burning hair of mother as I decapitate him He creeped me out. “The burning hair of my... did anybody catch the rest of what he said?” My commanding cocks shake heads. There is a nasty silence in air. I feel haunted so start chopping popping clits like oysters when Music hits and Suddenly a big party You see, I have designed my own afterlife and You can do it too if you try.


I barge in and relieve the nurses of their duties for the evening. They are mercenaries. I am a witch. I stick a pen into Jimmy’s ass and cup his balls into my mouth until he wakes up. Only a gift of the highest magnitude grants one entry to the deathbed of a golden man.

I smile up from between his thighs because I love what it feels like to be an illusion. There is something about my mouth being his last stop which puts me in communion with a long lineage of beautiful women yet saves me as the finale. Which makes me the most beautiful woman. I glue the photo of my dead family up there next to the rest of his women.

The funeral is attended by dozens of women, similar only in their singularity. Each of them is stunning - not beautiful - but stunning in their own ways. Thanks to Jimmy’s taste for 22 year olds, we are all exactly two months apart in age, fanned out like a spectrum of time itself as we wait in the bathroom line. I imagine the eldest of us - a Jewish brunette barnacled by thick, dark jewels who spent the Summer of ‘86 with Jimmy - pouring water from her hands into the hands of the woman behind her, who in turn does the same to the woman behind her, and so on and so forth. By the time the water reaches me, it is flavored by all of their palms.

Another elderly woman in a wheelchair rolls out of her toilet stall but before she exits the bathroom, commands her young grandson to stop all of the sudden. The grandson spins grandma around to address all of us.

“Some people, you can only meet by accident,” says the Eldest, her words echoing from the green tiles for a long time before she goes on, “Once your life has really been torn open. They appear for two months at a time.”

“Amen,” says the woman standing next to me. “Amen,” says the woman standing next to her. Now it is my turn to speak. The initiation is not yet complete. Having these many eyes on you from this kind of woman, really is enough to make you feel nice forever.

“Rest in pussy, Jimmy Komma,” I say. We all say.





Haunted Comedy