Hands off!

Goddammit, Garv, keep yr hands off my beanbag! It's not enough you gotta always be pawing through the junk in my cart, now you gotta play with my smiley face beanbag? Leave it alone! Stop making it talk with that stupid voice! Get the hell away from me and go do yr balloon thing somewhere else!

Gawd!

What the hell?!

So, I'm a mime, right? So I'm just walking along doing what I do, which is to follow some guy and mimic what he does and try to get a laugh and some change out of the miserable passers-by. And I'm tailing this one guy and he's doing all the normal coffee-drinking, ass-scratching stuff and I'm keeping right up with him when all of a sudden he turns around and hollers at me.

"What the hell are you doing?" he yells.

So I yell back. "I'm doing what you're doing! What the hell are YOU doing?"

I figure he'll get mad and storm off and I can play off that and it should be good for like five bucks, right? But instead he hauls back and pops me right in the damn nose! I sorta fell over a bus stop bench and landed on my ass on the sidewalk next to the number 45 bus from 2700 West to State Street. And when the bus pulls away there's this thing inthe gutter, a kind of white blob with a face drawn on it. I picked it up and it was a sock made into a beanbag and it's got a smiley face on one side and a frowny face on the other side and a piece of a black sock on one end like a hat. It's kind of limp and squashy and I want to throw it away, but then I think I'll try and do some gags with it, maybe make a couple bucks after all.

So I get up and do the "invisible wall" bit, you know, with my hands flat up in the air, and I say "hey, I'm stuck in an invisible box. Me and this sock creature, we're trapped. Gotta buck for a trapped mime and his faithful sock?"

Nothing. Not even a damn nickle.

And now it's getting late and I gotta get to the overpass before that son-of-a-bitch Steamboat takes my spot. I shoulda thrown the sock thing back in the gutter, but for some reason I stuck it in the cart and made it to the overpass just before dark. Steamboat didn't even show up that night.

Later, Garv saw the sockbag in the cart and asked about it, so I told him the story except for the guy punching me in the nose. Garv said he thought it was supposed to be a snowman, but I told him he was full if shit.

"It's shaped more like an eggplant, you dope. Get your damn feet off my cardboard."