PART ONE
Pete Cereval was a bum; as in dirty stinking bum. Dirty because the all the gyms and YMCA’s had shut him out, one right after the other, for clogging the drains and using up all of the paper towels. Stinking because when he wasn’t putting away inhuman amounts of scotch on the sidewalk or the corner bar, you could find him sleeping in an alley just past 16th street---his bed the inside of a trash dumpster, his pillow a mound of dirty diapers. The trash truck was his alarm.
His sole aim was annihilation. The first bottle was his coffee, the next his breakfast. If he didn’t manage lunch, that was o.k. but if dinner was withheld he’d get desperate.For Pete, putting his hands on some money was always the problem to solve, the nut to crack, the task for the reward. Most days he resorted to asking for change in front of the neighborhood park. Other ventures included badgering elderly men to pitch pennies for a few rounds. Pete would always lose. It was after these defeats when the agitation would kick in. These were not his best moments. He once tried to steal the backpack off of a 3rd grader after losing a pair of dimes but nearly got his eye poked out with a pencil.
Dogs thwarted his plans on a routine basis. An attempt at snatching a radio off a row house porch led to being chased at high-speed by an angry German Shepard. Pete dashed through an intersection like a clown on fire, looked over his shoulder and was knocked out cold by a pizza delivery moped. Ouch. The driver beat him silly cursing at him in Croatian. Two weeks later, he eyed a case of CD’s laying on the back seat of a Volvo. It seemed like easy pickings until the Pit Bull sleeping in the passenger seat woke up and bit off a golf ball sized chunk of his chin. At the free clinic Pete pressed the bloody paper towel against his face and told the receptionist, “I am done with the dog.”
The dogs weren’t done with him though. A Bull Terrier pissed on his leg the very next day. Pete was enraged. He unzipped and pissed back but then fell over, pissing on himself. Then the dog’s owner decided to piss on him. A curious onlooker came up and pissed on him as well. When the cop finally got to the scene there were no less than nine people in a big circle around Pete. You could hear his screams of agony. “It’s like acid! Stop it, stop it now mother fuckers, or I’ll report you!” The cop shoved the laughing, pissing people aside and told them to go home. Pete was thrown in the drunk tank for a week.
The day of his release he was mistakenly given someone else’s belongings. One of the items was a beat up wallet. Pete signed a paper and hurried out of jail, wondering if this was a set-up. Six blocks later he opened the wallet in the safety of the subway restroom. Inside there was a taped up dollar bill. The rest was stuffed with worn business cards and receipts. He let out a noise like a wounded animal and hurled the wallet into the broken toilet as hard as he could. The splash soaked him head to toe in piss. Back up on the street, he decided to buy a lottery ticket with the found money. That morning he got lucky. How lucky? After taxes, his personal fortune added up to the tune of 15 million dollars. Now that’s a lucky bum; one lucky, dirty, stinking bum. He blazed through crates of booze, showered the ladies with gold and got himself a fancy set of wheels. After the two weeks the celebration was over, he got wise. He laid down a large stack to construct a twenty-room house in the hills.
Despite his great fortune he still went down to the bar where he had spent a good portion of the last ten years of his life. He liked to spread his prosperity. All of his drinking buddies were treated to endless gallons of rotgut. One night, while watching a boxing match on the tv, his buddy Jerry related to him that there's no good fights anymore. Pete thought about this while staring past the screen. In a flash fueled by whiskey and a bloated bank account, he told Jerry that he was going to change all that. He told him that he'd put on the fight of the century. There wouldn’t be anything like it on the planet. He could see the poster in his head as clear as day, two by three feet, with giant letters on luminous orange cardstock. And the billboard, pasted up all over downtown: BIGFOOT versus THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN.
