Velociworld

OSCAR

Once upon a time, many many moons ago, when I was a young cur, I rented a house in midtown Savannah. It was a nice neighborhood, but the house was a delapidated piece of shit. Being a renter, I of course did nothing to improve the curb appeal.

Next door lived a 17-year-old boy named Oscar, being guardianed by his grandmother. Oscar suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, his mama having possessed a voracious appetite for the bottle, which was apparently exacerbated 17 years prior by the unfortunate and unwanted incubation of said Oscar.

Oscar did very little, by which I mean he did nothing, except to walk around the perimeter of his yard with military precision, with a ghetto blaster perched upon his shoulder, which played the J. Giels Band's Freeze Frame! over, and over, and over. Oscar had a perpetual scowl, too. He was on a mission to nowhere fast. His mein positively screamed dead prostitute in the trunk.

Now Oscar lived with his grandmother, as I said, his mama having succumbed to the petrification of her liver and other bilious humours. Grandmama had no clue how to deal with the eccentric Oscar, and so he stalked the perimeter of the yard, scowling to Freeze Frame! Freeze Frame! with utter abandon.

At some point my cousin moved in for a couple of months, with a kitten in tow. No idea why he had this cat. I suspect a girlfriend had departed in sufficient haste to neglect to take her kitty, escape being more important than pettage. Oscar liked the kitten, and would chase it around the yard when sentinel duty did not beckon. Life went on.

And yet one Sunday morning I awoke after a night of drunken gladiator sex, and went outside to fetch the paper. And there, under my bedroom window, I found the throttled, strangulated corpse of my cousin's kitten.

Oscar! thinks I, sagely. That fucking voyeur! Probably ejaculated simultaneously with me, only me to the soft mewling of a blonde dental hygienist with a sunburned nose, he to the soft mewling of a strangulated feline.

I moved shortly thereafter. Call me old-fashioned, but that Oscar, he just creeped me out.

Freeze Frame! indeed.