Warm thoughts about Skuggy from Deadbomb Bingo Ray

Skuggy is more than just a character from Deadbomb Bingo Ray, Crossroader, Steam In The Marrow, and The Devil On Macon Street. More than just a clock worker, a thug, a man with one withered arm. A long time ago, a version of him actually walked the Earth.

Lushane had a dozen names. He was a small time drug dealer when I met him. This was in 1985. I was a runaway from a foster home in Springfield, Missouri, generally in the market for weed, and Lushane was maybe twenty, wiry and black, with a withered arm he strapped to his chest in a pillow case. His entire family had been gunned down in a Detroit heroin feud gone wrong, right in front of him no less, so Lushane was a little crazy. We all were, I guess. I remember that time fondly, and any of the other survivors likely do too. Lushane was not destined to make it this far, though I have no idea where his final resting place may be. Some wise ass Star Trek bumper sticker mystic has it that you’re only truly dead when the last person who remembers you dies. My shit is in The Library of Congress, so I’m all good. But so are you Lushane. We called you Skuggy. Skug.

Skug’s place was tiny, a one room granny annex on a dumpy little house in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was terrified of his lesbian landlady, who forbade him to have visitors of any kind and would sometimes sucker punch him. Dude had to make money somehow, so he had visitors. The construction of that micro underworld was dominated by outsiders. Skug and a bank robber named Travis were the poles. Skuggy got terrible weed from somewhere and broke it down into dime bags. Street kids would buy them at a discount, ten for fifty, and go out and sling to the child idiots at UNM for food money.

“You guys gots ta get the fuck outta here!” Deeply paranoid look to either side. “Get in here.” That’s how Skuggy answered the door. Every time.

The Story Of Skuggy’s Arm

From Deadbomb Bingo Ray-

“Hm. Tell you what. One time, oh, long time ago now. I was fifteen. My uncles were runnin’ horse out of this motel, I used to hang around, go get shit from the corner store. Momma gunned down in the kitchen year before, didn’t have shit to do.” He paused. Ray never talked about the years before they met, and neither did Skuggy. Ever. Ray lit up a second cigarette and listened, watching the snow fall on the dumpster in front of the car.

            “There was this girl worked the corner. Chicky. Sometimes they called her Dulce, but I always rolled with Chicky. My Chicky. Puerto Rican and she had jungle butt, little waist. Blue lipstick, she like that. I had this huge love on that woman, follow her around and I sing songs to her…”

-cue music  Love And Happiness, Al Green

            Ray prepared himself for something horrifying.

            “My uncles got me a piece of that for my birthday. I so excited, gonna fuck on Chicky, like a dream inside a dream inside a dream, jus can’t be real. Big blowout night, tickets to Journey. I used ta love that band. They get me an’ Chicky a room, and she come in an’ she smell so good, Ray, like popcorn and grape candy. We got some blow and some ludes and some crystal, an’ Chicky, she do a few lines and then she do a thing I ain’t seen ‘fore or since. She make a mix, lude an’ crystal, an’ she shoot me up and get suckin’, and right when I gonna pass out, she bring me back up on the crystal, Imma blow, back on down on a poke o’ that lude juice. Up an’ down, up an’ down, an’ I think Imma go crazy baby, hour after hour like a crazy roller coaster in Coney. Damn…”

            Ray was quiet.

            “I’s so in love. I wake up a day later an’ my arm… My arm, it all slick an’ it don’t work right, and my uncles think that so damn funny. Damn. So I just kinda hang back, keep all quiet, and ‘bout a month go by, I get me a sling. Make it from a pillowcase. Chicky, my Chicky, like she don’t even know any kinda skinny little whistlin’ boy wif no funny arm.”

            “Fuck those people,” Ray said eventually, when he realized the story was over.

            “Oh, I did Raymond. I did.”

Skug believed that a Thanksgiving turkey was a pigeon with something deeply wrong with it. He was incredibly good at chess and used beer caps and little wads of toilet paper for some of the pieces. He had an old bong and he would do big hits off cigarette butts he picked up on Central. He was a black dude from Detroit and he loved Journey. And he had a huge smile with all his teeth in it. Unlike Travis, who like many rednecks had trouble keeping the front ones.

Travis, who should live on in infamy as well, was another good guy. A Kentucky native, he’d robbed a bank while drunk and desperate after breaking up with his gal. The robbery netted him a small stack of twenty dollar bills, many of which he dropped on the way out. Travis held on to enough to get a tank and a half of gas and make it across state lines, and then he robbed a gas station so he could keep going. The net at the gas station was over a thousand, but Travis was done with guns, so when the truck broke down, he stayed where it was and became a man of peace- a dime bag weed dealer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Right now I’m working on a project that takes place in New Mexico, and I can’t help but remember all those people. For whatever crazy reason, in my mind’s eye they’re all smiling, too. If the bumper sticker dude is right, and I doubt it, they’re smiling at me for writing this, smiling that I somehow found a way to sneak a piece of them into a paper vehicle moving through time better than they had.

Rock on dudes.