They Bite

It was our usual Sunday morning gathering of dumpfucks. Lardass had brought the day-old pastry, Rajid was making coffee in the old dented coffee urn that had been retrieved from the take-and-leave section. I had been up early (5am) and noticed a pile of Sunday Globes in front of the newsstand. They would not be open until 7am. Someone had cut the twine holding the pile together, and had taken a paper and tucked 2 one dollar bills under a rock that kept the papers from blowing away. I helped myself to three papers and the money. The early bird gets the goodies. Honesty is for losers.

Everyone had a section to read for a change. Lardass got excited when he read the item about the Tiger attacking the famous trainer Roy the while on stage at the Mirage. "Hey Rajid, did you see this?" Rajid had heard about the attack from the TV news. He keeps a grown white Bengal tiger which he brought in to our recent take-your-cat-to-work day.
"This is not so surprising," he said. "My little Cindee has attacked several of my children. We lost two of them last year."
"My god!" I gasped, "Why haven't you had the vicious beast put down?"
"Oh no. These Tigers are very valuable and rare. Children are easy to make." he said pointing to the family photo of him posing with his large family and tired looking wife.
We were all sitting there somewhat shocked at Rajid's attitude, when Bill came in. His right arm was in a sling. His elbow was heavily bandaged, but you could see fleks of blood seeping through.
"What the fuck happened to you?" we wondered.
"My horse kicked me." Bill announced. "Thanks for coming to visit me in the hospital."
"We didn't know you were hurt. When did it happen?" I tried to sound caring, but an article in the paper caught my eye. Some guy in the Bronx had been bitten by a 400lb pet tiger he was keeping in his government subsidized apartment.
Bill was talking, but I wasn't listening anymore. It just sounded like more droning injury details - blah, blah,de blah. I was getting tired of Bill getting wounded every few weeks just to get attention. And I was wondering if we should set up a wild animal recycle area. Nah.
"No one feels my pain," he moaned. We all avoided eye contact with him and rolled out eyes at each other. He was right, again.
Lardass changed the subject. "Hey look at this, the paper reports that Doctor mistakes kill about 50,000 patients every year in USA hospitals. Most of these are deaths caused by infected wounds. Here's an idea: We send the murderous Doctors to North Korea to "help" the enemy (sort of like a reverse M*A*S*H ) during the next war instead of wasting our valuable weapons of total destruction." We all nodded in agreement. Good ideas are hard to come by these days.