I Woke Next to the Corpse by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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producing, malodorous, and tasty grub in it, perhaps the result of a previous hasty exit. I opened the cabinet to its left and found the good stuff; Johnnie Walker Blue Label and Stolichnaya Razberi were out in front of a standing regiment of better than half-filled bottles. Now certain that the last exit was indeed hasty, I had some Johnnie for breakfast, straight from the bottle. A few swaps and I was feeling good. My chest and countenance warmed like a roasted hazelnut sold by a Fifth Avenue street vendor.

I recalled the good old days, before I was sent off to the travesty which is euphemistically called school, when Mom used to play all sorts of talk shows and silly music on her blue radio with those deep blue knobs, best left alone, as the majority of them just made the thing fizz like a dud firecracker.

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The song with the lyrics of “Stick out your can, here comes the garbage man” made a lasting impression on me, and I think Mom too. I especially loved “The Jack Benny Program” with Rochester, using a raspy voice to say; “Yassuh, Missah Binny. Ah jus loves dat shoe shinin’,” an hilarious pre-cursor of things to come.

There also was “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” “The Shadow Knows,” “Duffy’s Tavern,”

“Spike Jones,” “It Pays to Be Ignorant,” “The Judy Canova Show,”

and “everything is turning blue now.”

I’m lousy with the awareness that they will soon be coming to ice me, but these thoughts are little distraction from my main job, as they pass through my mind a million times faster than it would take to write them down. I’m in a perch, at the top of the world, as this cabin sits on the apex of a ten acre wooded lot, which slopes rather severely down to the road.

I Woke Next to the Corpse