Brain Wreck

I never would have guessed that my lifelong friend would wind up as a shark sandwich. Poor Irma! I know that the shark was probably hungry, and he probably had a wife and kids to support somewhere, but I still hope that he found her to be old and tough and stringy. Irma, bless her heart, was way past her expiration date.
Me and Irma grew up together in Brooklyn and lived a couple of blocks from each other for all our lives. Irma married a guy named Luigi Tomatoeglia who had a good job with Brooklyn Waste Disposal. He was one of the guys who rode on the back of the garbage truck and jumped off to dump the cans. He got paid pretty good. Irma and Luigi had eight kids, and they still always had money for the church. Anyway, one day Luigi was at work when he jumped off to dump a can and the driver accidentally accelerated when Luigi only had one foot back up on the truck. Luigi got flipped up in the air, and he landed upside down with his feet caught on the top of a chain link fence and his face down in a section of some freshly poured concrete sidewalk. The concrete crew was on a coffee break when it happened, so nobody noticed anything for a while. Luigi was stunned by the impact, and by the time they noticed him he had drowned in the cement.
To this very day, at the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Pope Pius XII Drive, there is what has become a famous Brooklyn landmark of Luigi’s face forever imprinted in the concrete sidewalk. It’s kinda’ like the Brooklyn version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. People use it as a meet-up place or something to point out for the out-of-town relatives to tell the folks back home. There ain’t much else of interest around the old neighborhood unless you really like rodents.
Not too long after Luigi made his mark in the world, my husband, Benito Mussolini Gambini, father of my six children, took off with a woman named Desiree. She called herself an “escort”, but I got other names for her which I cannot bring myself to speak out loud. Anyway, a few weeks later, Benny was found at a place called The Hour of Power Motel in Cairo, Illinois, with no car, no money, no clothes, and no pulse. The coroner, who also happened to be the owner of The Hour of Power Motel, ruled that he died of natural causes.
After all that nonsense, me and Irma decided that we’d had enough. Our kids were grown and gone and mostly worthless, so we started heading down to Miami Beach every winter for an old gals’ vacation. At our age, our vacation mostly consisted of having fancy fru-fru cocktails and all-you-can-eat buffets. That’s where we probably made our biggest mistake. One day we went to a place called General Gluttony’s All-You-Can-Eat Seafood Buffet. The place looked pretty inviting, so we went in and paid up and got down to business.
I had been trying to watch my weight, so I stopped eating after about an hour or so. Irma, however, really loved her seafood. She kept going for a couple of more hours and washing everything down with Anchor Steam and Pacifico beer.
A little later, as we were waddling down the street, we passed a shop called Salty Stanley’s Surfboard Rentals. Irma looked at me and said, “What the hell, girl. We’re on vacation. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Well, it wasn’t long before we found the answer to that question. I’ve always thought that the reason Mr. Shark picked Irma was because, after all that seafood she had eaten and all that beer, she smelled like a giant drunken fish. I guess we all make errors in judgment sometimes.
RIP Irma.