Last Bender

CHAPTER NINE             “I’d like to suck his cock,” she said, looking very fem in her lowcut, black dress, drop earrings, and gold necklace. “Look at those ass cheeks. Shit, they show right through.”   She kicked off her burgundy suede pumps. “I wonder what his fingers look like.”   She stretched and wiggled her toes, coral [...]

  CHAPTER EIGHT   Before going to lunch with Linda I stopped in at the office to chew things over with the guys. No one chews a bone better than a room full of rum faced, tobacco stained dicks.             The security section is a cinder block tank about four thousand feet square, with a [...]

CHAPTER SEVEN             On the way to the car I passed McSorley’s. I could’ve let it slide. Nothing would’ve pleased me more in fact, except maybe an ice cream cone with nuts and sprinkles. But I had to stick it in. It had to be.             The door dinged open and shut. I gave the [...]

CHAPTER SIX               Doctor and Mrs. St. Claude lived in northeast, where the streets are narrow and lined with tall trees and townhouses. Occasionally you come across a half block taken up by a monstrously ugly high rise. Between the drapes you see flashes of peach, mauve, and cappuccino, framed with black and white [...]

CHAPTER FIVE             “TIMOTHY Philip STRUNGil,” I said.             “Right,” he barked back across the three-foot stack of folders and binders, each marked with a bible’s worth of Post-its, skin blanched by the overhead lights. The man was solid, concentrated, with a strong neck and large head, hair squared-off like a hedge. He had a [...]

CHAPTER FOUR Monozone was a quiet place at seven in the morning. I sat in my cubicle thinking, Stronghole is not a bad man. Anyone’d want to work with him. He had a good reputation. And that was amazing in an outfit like this. We sometimes pissed side by side or shared an elevator. Two [...]

CHAPTER THREE               I slept most the day as best I could. For supper I fried up ham and cheese on rye in margarine till the crust was brown and crunchy, and drank an orange pop. Then I met my best friend Linda and her husband Mac at The Glory Hole. Linda and I [...]

CHAPTER TWO             I drove through the security gates of Monozone’s underground garage and into the orange gelatin concrete of Bartholin Plaza. A squat, liver colored sun struggled against the herringbone bay. Garbage trucks trundled down the block.             The road still bore traces of a double yellow line but no one paid it any [...]

              THE LAST BENDER   By Buzz Callaway       Even damnation is poisoned with rainbow. Leonard Cohen, The Old Revolution     CHAPTER ONE Blood. Never have I seen so much blood. It was on the ceiling in big raggedy ovals and splashed on the walls. It formed a vinyl slick across [...]

The Last Bender OK, for the next few months I’m going to post a chapter a week of Last Bender. The Last Bender is my second complete novel. After I finished Specimen Tank I had no project. There were some little, fruitless ideas that I was batting about but nothing ever came of them. Then [...]