Welcome to Fuckin’ Deadwood!
On a particularly savage bender last night — who knew that raspberries soaked in ether could be such a kick? — my consciousness faded like a blow to the back of the head just as an announcement came on the teevee that the third season of Deadwood had come out on DVD. This morning, I awoke in a desolate fug of rancid cigar-smoke and bourbon fumes to find a hurriedly scrawled missive affixed to my front door with a massive hunting knife. Without comment — the better to assuage my aching head — I reproduce it here.
I remember a time back in ‘76 when a hooplehead — an amenable youngster who turned out to be working the Lost-Father grift on the trusting citizenry — was pushing a fuckin’ broom at the Gem. He was particularly impressed by a Specialist we called the Tit-Licker: He’d line ‘em up at two-foot intervals, smock-tops down, and all but sprinted past ‘em givin’ their titties a lick, and if he missed a titty, did not let himself retrace his steps.
Something ya gotta know about Specialists, I told the lad – they pay a premium, and they never cause fuckin’ trouble. Sometimes, I told him, I imagined in my declining years runnin’ a small joint in Manchester, England, catering to Specialists exclusive. And to let ‘em know they’re amongst their own, maybe I’d operate from the corner, hanging upside down like a fuckin’ bat.
And that’s what it’s fuckin’ come to. My joint in Manchester is a going fuckin’ concern — those Specialists are money in the fuckin’ bank — but I do confess my heart beats desolately, pining for the Gem in Deadwood. Since fuckin’ Milch beat town for some airy cocksucker named John — from Cincinnati, no less; nothing good ever came from that shithole town — things ain’t been even close to what we might term the same.
Trixie — my partner here in Manchester, and the most capital fuckin’ whoremistress a pimp might ask for — mentioned to me the other day that she’d been pondering what might have come of the old place. From my cheerfully inverted post I replied that that depended on how well the cocksuckers had dealt with the Hearst Question. That was, after all, the central issue of what you’re inclined to call Season Three, but which I fondly think of as my fuckin’ puff: What to do when Big Money enters the question? We’d established a nice, comfortable little proposition: The hoopleheads dig up the fuckin’ gold, and spend it on the whiskey and pussy available at the Gem, or (if they’ve struck it particularly fuckin’ rich) at Cy Tolliver’s Bella Union.
But that Hearst cocksucker — he was a different kettle of fuckin’ fish — a Specialist of an entirely different sort. He was the fuckin’ Gilded Age personified: in love with what he called The Color for its own sake, and not with the pelf it brings. Lived like a fuckin’ tonsured monk in that rathole of Farnum’s, kicking out walls and windows for reasons apparent only to him. But get between him and The Color, and — well. Watch out for your fingers, if you take my meaning. You may suddenly find one or two of ‘em on the fuckin’ floor.
It’s a strange, unpredictable thing, living as a creation of Milch’s mind. One minute you’re living high and tight, helping the working stiffs get some stink on their johnsons, working the grift and making the nut; the next you’re hanging by your knees in Manchester, a sudden and fuckin’ unforeseen retirement thrust on you like a bolt out of the blue. I didn’t like it any more than you did, Jingo. No indeed.
And what the fuck is surfing?
Fuckin’ Milch, indeed.
Well said Swinjin!