The Mordor Lamentations of Samwise Gamgee as He Prepares a Brace of Coneys

by Mike Itaya

Swear on my Ma, if Gollum loogies near my coney stew, I’ll kick him right in the balls. I wish I was just off somewhere. Skinny dipping in Brandywine River. Sippin’ potato vodka. Instead, I’m stuck with these two sobersides, Gollum and Frodo Baggins, midway to Mordor. They’re always clucking behind my back like a brood of hens: “Sam’s in recovery.” 

Before hooking up with Mr. Frodo, I was in a bad way. 

I’d go on these week-long benders, potato vodka flooding my veins and you get lonely, you know? On Mid-year’s Day I tried to put some moves on Rosie Cotton, my lifelong neighbor-crush, but, like always, she slammed the door in my face. 

Standing outside Rosie’s unwelcoming bungalow (she turned out her porch light, too), I wasn’t even a suitor. I was a nuisance, a creep. I was halfway through another year, with no one to share my heart. 

Later that evening things really took a turn for the worse, after I was booted from the Prancing Pony, and I blacked out in Frodo’s garden——and Gandalf “Weird Beard” rocked me with his staff, and impressed me into A.A.-cum-indentured servitude with Mr. Frodo (along with the loinclothed Gollum), lugging all their shite to Hell and back. 

For half my life, I’ve been looking out at the Shire, at my Pa, at my bumpkin, potatoey hands, and I’m like “Goddamn, is this it?” For all my days, I’ve lived in the shadow of love, beneath Rosie’s regard, the grace that might have been my own. In the boozeless wastelands of Mordor, the Sea of Núrnen, the Mountains of Shadow, there’s been many an hour an evil mood would slip over Frodo, Gollum, and me, and I pondered the suffering that we surely deserved. But I remember the first time my Pa shared his drink, and rested his hand upon my knee, and the feeling of lightness that entered my brain, a voice that promised I was loved and I would never again be alone.

Mike Itaya is the editor-in-chief of DIRTBAG and writes about dirtbags, always.