My name is Solomon Burke.  I hate my parents for that.  I tried to kill them six times during the first ten years of my life.  They tried four times.  It wasn’t sequential.  They tried once when I was in the womb and three times during my ninth birthday.
            I have a really neat hole in my hand where the coat-hanger passed through me.  It never healed up.  It rendered peek-a-boo fucking pointless.  The other hole healed up although I still piss blood every so often.
            I work in the local supermarket.  I’ve worked here for twenty years now.  It’s gone increasingly downmarket every time it’s been bought out.  These days they might as well only sell three-litre bottles of cider and cigarettes with warning labels in indecipherable languages.  Every customer is scum.  The rest of the staff are scum.  I’m not any better. 
            I get up every morning and see what corpse has been dumped on the doorstep by someone’s cat.  I don’t know whose cat it is.  I’ve never done anything to benefit the cat.  This morning’s bloody mess was not identifiable.  It gave me a glimpse into a world where my mother had been successful.
            “Where’s the cider?” asks a twelve year-old in a white tracksuit stained with hints of vomit.
            “It’s over there” I say and point to the entire wall of affordable alcohol.
            He walks off without thanking me.  I stare as he picks up a three-litre bottle of cider and wanders over to the till.  I watch as Herman the Retarded German rings up the one pound and forty-nine pence.  He is here on an exchange scheme that involved sending the manager’s son to learn about efficiency.  Herman’s not his name and he’s not retarded, I just fucking hate him for some reason.
            I was in love once.  She left me for someone else.  I took it well.  I smashed their car’s windscreen during their son’s first birthday.  I really wish she’d just decided to talk things through.  I cut my hand.
            The manager was very understanding when she left me.  He invited me into his office and told me about his own divorce.  He offered me a glass of his cider and a cigarette.  He explained to me that I could take all the time off I needed and so I decided to follow my wife on her honeymoon and then spend a few weeks fucking Puerto Rican whores until I ran out of money.  I slept on benches a lot and found out that you can filter grain alcohol through a t-shirt.
            “You got lighter gas?” asks a woman with a child.
            “Ask him” I say and gesture at Herman.
            The woman shuffles over to Herman who spends a while trying to understand her before finally gesturing to me in despair.
            “Excuse him, he’s a fucking kraut” I say to her.  “He couldn’t find a blogger in an attic… know what I mean?”
            “No” says the woman.
            “He kills Jews” I tell her.
            “What’s a Jew?” asks the woman.
            “My grandfather, he rescued many Jewish people” says Herman calmly.
            “Shut the fuck up Herman” I snap and reach over him and take a can of gas off the shelf.  “Here…” I say and thrust it into the woman’s outstretched hand, “knock yourself out.”
            She puts a handful of change on the counter and shuffles out.
            “Solomon… My grandfather, he was good man.  Stop telling people he killed lots of people.”
            “It’s no fun if you don’t play along Herman” I sigh.
            “We Germans find it no laughing matter.”
            “Oh for fuck’s sake…” I shriek and fling my hands in the air.  “Why can’t you just let me have a brief moment of fun?”
            “We find it no laughing matter.  You shouldn’t make those jokes.”
            “My wife left me.”
            “I am very sorry.”
            “Can I live at your place for a while?”
            “Sure.”
           
            I urinate into a cider bottle. 
           
Oh, I should have mentioned.  I have some mental problems.  The doctors tell me it was something I caught off one of the whores.  I have these things burrowing into my brain.  The doctors say I’m not allowed to do a whole list of things.
           
I throw the cider bottle at the plate glass window.
           
Somewhere along the line I think the spirochetes ate some of my brain’s filters.
            The manager won’t fire me because he feels bad about marrying my wife.  Plus he doesn’t want any more of the suicide attempts in the store. 
            “Clean up on aisle eine” I tell Herman.
           
            “You want chips?” asks Herman as we sit in his tiny bedsit.
            “Did you put mayonnaise on them?” I ask sarcastically.
            “No.”
            “Oh just go fuck yourself” I snap and storm out.
Later I throw a television through the wrong person’s window.

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