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I sat in a hospital bed while a doctor tried to explain to an elderly Korean woman through one of those handheld translator PDA things that if they didn't remove her colon tumor in 15 minutes, she'd explode shit in a ten foot radius and die a horrible death. She still insisted that she wanted to leave and go back to work. That was when the nurse jumped me and planted this giant fucking spike in my hand and started the anesthesia drip. They wheeled me into a room as a nurse made me sign some papers saying that even though it was a routine set of tests and nothing more, I couldn't sue them if they fucked up and cut off my dick or something. Then all I remember is some kind of lucid nightmare about the surgeon babbling about his golf scores and hitting on one of the nurses as Demerol and Valium surged through my veins.
I awoke the new Slipknot video on the room's TV set, with a chick nurse that looked like she just escaped some kind of teen methadone halfway house. "Isn't Slipknot fuckin' killer?" she asked. "Oh hey, you wanna Ram-Bosham for the rest of your pain meds?" I didn't think a situation that weird had ever been captured in American Literature to that point, so I wrote it down in my Palm Pilot. Then I hit her in the head with my bedpan five times, grabbed her wallet, and made a run for it.
"Where we going?" asked the taxi driver, between tugs on his half-empty bottle of Mello Yello.
I climbed into the cab outside. "414 South Mitchell. It's just past Atwater," I said. I was still wearing hospital scrubs, but I got the IV out of my arm just before bolting out the back door.
"Is it Monday?" I asked the cabbie.
"Thursday," he said. "The 8th."
"Shit man," I said. "I didn't know how long I was out. I thought it was like a day. I had this dream I was living in an underground bunker that looked like that video game Dig Dug with this family of mole people."
"Is that the one with the air pump, where you make the monsters explode?" he asked.
"Yeah, but I didn't have the air pump," I said. "I did have a GameBoy that let me travel time, though. And on the GameBoy, it had a Dig Dug game, so it was like infinitely recursive or something."
"That's fucked up," he said. "Were you reading in your dream?"
"What, do you think I'm some kind of homo?" I said. "Anyway, the GameBoy had some kind of radioactive leak, and I could feel the hair on my head falling out, my muscles atrophying. I looked at the ground and saw dirt eroding at a rapid rate, like the movie The Time Machine. When it ended and I emerged, I looked like Tom Petty and I was a Latin professor with twin baby boys that talked in Polish. The next thing I knew, I was in Canada, driving an RV with a boat on a trailer. I was visiting my friend Adrian from grade school, and although the RV was really huge and unbalanced, I whipped it through the streets of Vancouver or Toronto or wherever we were. You weren't supposed to drive the trailer faster than 50 mph but I pushed it past 120, until the wheel bearings started smoking."
"They've got the metric system in Canada," he said. The signs wouldn't be in miles an hour." He pulled into the front driveway of the house and hit the receipt button on the meter.
"Yeah, yeah!" I took a couple of twenties from the nurse's wallet and handed them to the driver. "You didn't see me here. Have a good one."
He took a hit from his Mello Yello, and headed back to the city.
7
He put the gun to his head, pulled the trigger nine times, and felt the slugs tear through his skull. He didn't feel anything. He decided that he'd refer to himself in the third person from now on, and briefly considered referring to everyone else in the first person, and then writing some kind of fucked up, Bertrand Russell-esque logic book about the construct, using it to explain why Jesus was a lie. Instead, he put the pistol back in the velvet-lined box, kicked it under his bed, and went to work.
Outside, the sky rained a conflicting tonal mass of Korg synthesizer notes, and the people around him spoke with dubbed East German voices. Probably a hallucination, but he wondered if he forgot to take some medication or something. He saw a girl he met the day before, a blonde, cute, walking her beagle. When he smiled at her, she acted like he was her rapist, torturer, and tax attorney all in one. Maybe her memory was erased. Maybe it was a different girl with the same dog. Maybe he had food in his teeth. He reached underneath the leather jacket for the gun, but remembered the nine shots, the velvet box, the kick under the bed. He couldn't bring a gun into a federal building anyway.
He was in the shit, owed $863 to the Bureau of Indian Affairs because he went to buy firecrackers, got drunk, and shot up a casino. It took him a dozen tries to find the office and it was closed. He wished he could just take the money and buy a bunch of Smiths CDs, then dye his hair black and sit in his apartment all day, watching VH-1. Then people would say, "Oh, he's depressed. Nobody else would listen to that much Morrisey." But then it would become a big joke to the world, and dilute the feelings. When you fuck everyone in sight, you can't fuck someone to show that you love them. (Of course, right now he wished he could fuck anyone.)
It's dark like a noir film about some fucked up guy (probably played by Jim Carey) wandering the streets of a college campus, waiting for an asteroid the size of Texas to hit the earth, and he's going to be picked by NASA to drill the asteroid, some college chicks, a bunch of strippers and Liv Tyler. Real life never happens that way. Instead, it's black like the rum in a bottle, rapidly vanishing a shot at a time.
Dark. He walks home, opens the velvet-lined box, reloads nine silver bullets in the clip. Suicide madlibs. "Dear cruel (noun). I'm tired and I don't want to (verb) anymore." Before he empties another clip into his skull, he takes his Prozac anyway, vows to find the web site for the Indian thing and send a check tomorrow, and skims through the new Entertainment Weekly.
11
How can I make LSD? Where can I find help on anal fisting? Where did you get the big man-tits like Meatloaf in fight club, and will they go away if you stop chugging Robitussen spiked with cow urine? Does my local library have any filmstrips on double vaginal penetration? Why does god hate me? How did I wake up in a 7-Eleven with a sawed off shotgun held at the cashier's head, screaming that he needed to lick my balls and give me the fucking money before I sprayed his fucking brains all over the nacho and breakfast burrito cheese machine?
I saw my leg with a magic marker, the rough and spent tip dragging across my chafed flesh as the Dale Earnhardt fan club's commando squad drills a hole in my vault-like front door to insert the first of the explosive charges. The shit stains on her front teeth looked like Jesus. I wanted to shave her mustache and fuck an emergency room of attending physicians. The lowrider Mazda RX-7 said "Magnetic Motherfucker" across the rear spoiler in hot pink lettering, with Sid Vicious at the wheel, injecting heroin in his abdomen with a Wenkel rotary injection system.
"Where are they now" was the name of her first child, conceived with a synthetic plastic barbecue sauce applicator stolen from a Burger King drive through. I moved to hell to avoid any possible paternity situations. My lawyer told me I could not patent the letter E, although episode 27 of Star Trek: The Next Generation clearly proves I did invent it. Trent Reznor cut my lawn last week and charged me ten bucks, green chlorophyll on his face from where he huffed Chemlawn fertilizer in a sad attempt to get high. He asked for a tip and I told him never rhyme Fire with Desire.
The extroverted neighbor with the blue aluminum siding took a large amount of "diet pills" with some Metamucil and patiently awaited for her colon to explode. The poolboy looked like Leonardo DeCaprio with Marv Albert's toupee. When he found her comatose body, he furiously masturbated to the image of Ricardo Montalban in a three-way with Chelsea Clinton and that Noxema girl that splashes the water on her face. She splashed hot beef gravy on Ricardo's taint while he recited the preamble to the constitution in falsetto. The poolboy shot his load in a cable TV outlet, and the jizz somehow made it possible to get the Home and Garden TV channel for the next few days. The neighbor eventually shit blood, and called her acupuncturist from a football phone.
65
Me and Nick went to a 7-Eleven for Slurpees and El Tacos, and walked in during a standoff between seven BATF officers and two kids with post-And Justice For All Metallica t-shirts and long-short haircuts. A pickup truck full of Michigan Militia members did a drive-by, starting a clusterfuck of return file. The doors burst open and rabid spectators looted the tiny store, stealing Doritos and cartons of Marlboros, eating hot nacho cheese from the dispenser, and breaking open bottles of warm beer and showering the place with foam. An out-of-work porn star with huge fake tits and a lizard-like tan sucked off the dead bodies. I threw the lottery ticket machine through the front window, dove out of the shattered glass, and grabbed the dispenser filled with thousands scratch-off tickets on the sprint back to the car.
During the drive back, I kept thinking about the unabashed violence, the reactions of the pedestrians who started lighting everything on fire and chanting "kill whitey," even though the storeowner was Indian. Luckily, Nick grabbed a six-pack of cold Pepsi in those tall plastic 20 ounce bottles before they melted like everything else in the vicinity. We got back to our game of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy before the place got really ugly with cops.
The first round of police investigators on the scene began by firing 40,000 rounds of ammunition into every moving object within ten blocks of the store. Then, they took some Polaroids, and sent in two coroners in spacesuits to assess the damage. They started with the least damaged apartments, about 17 miles east of the store.
"What is it, Jim?" said examiner A to B.
"He's literally had the shit beat of him, Dave." The investigators leaned over the body of a gay nightclub dancer, inside a condominium half burned by the police air strike with F-15E jets that dropped incendiary devices to calm down the crowds. "Somebody fed him high-residue foods for six or seven days straight, then forced him to drink an overdose of a saline diuretic. A few minutes later, they took off his pants, and beat him with bamboo sticks around the midsection and rectum."
"Horrible..."
"And I don't think his family will get back the deposit on this apartment."
The cops put a pull-over gorilla mask on his corpse and took turns kicking him in the ribcage, yelling "you fucking filthy ape!" and pretending they were Charlton Heston. It all started with the porno version of the infamous classic, Giant Cock Up The Ass of The Planet of the Apes, banned in almost every American theatre, even adult triple-X places. (It did get rave reviews and high box office in Greece, however.) They acted out all of the grisly ape necrophilia scenes, taking turns on the corpse, somehow borrowing a chimpanzee from a local zoo and adding it to the mix. Like eating dead bodies of friends after a plane crash in the Alps, the act of fucking a dead animal had no taboo implications to the adrenaline-pumped duo. Afterwards, they ordered a pizza, watched a Seahawks game on TV, and split the chimp open with a naked lady lamp from a flea market.
86
"Fuck the stoma! Fuck the stoma!" The fans yelled as I raped the cancer surgery reward with a Dremel moto-tool. The doctors shot me with lidicane paint guns, but I wore an XFL 50th anniversary commemorative leather and plastic crew jacket. Fuckyouall!
My boss told me to go fire Ronald Reagan, and cut off his fucking medical benefits before he ate the California taxpayer out of house and home. I got into an elevator full of disfigured lepers gangbanging each other in every orifice: ass-cunt-cock, cock-ass-mouth, mouth-ass-hand, hand-cock-cock, cunt-cunt-mouth-ass, you name it. I tried to jerk it while holding ten boxes of hot cherry pie in my left hand, but I couldn't do it. Not even a half-chub for the lepers.
Ding! Beatnik dwarves took over the occupational psychotherapy clinic, berets, and stubby little arms and Jack Kerouac poetry in those giddy little voices. A Roto-Rooter technician asked, "you need anything? I got... um, trazodone?"
"Where the fuck is the loan officer? I'm trying to buy a big fucking car to impress the chicks. With leather."
He attacked me with his shit-stained hands, tried to choke me and knock me to the fucking floor. Envy. I hit him in the fucking head with a spare dwarf, ran like a motherfucker, and jumped out of a tenth-floor window. The glass splintered into my ballsac, and I hit a pretzel cart on the street, breaking my fall somewhat. I limped to a Wendy's, bought a Frosty to coat my jewels and relieve the pain, and I also got a salad, but they don't even give you a fucking breadstick anymore.
Every Indianapolis 500 driver went straight for the wall in turn three, as some form of strange protest against the park officials changing from Coke to Pepsi. Explosions and burning fuel shot car tires and shrapnel into the audience, promising generations of retards, deformities, and genetic birth defects. When the fire brigade arrived, they found all of their trucks had been filled with kerosene, which was mass-pumped onto the blaze to further fuel the flames. The people in the infield kept drinking beer, and had a solemn mass-orgy, fat bellies pounding against sagging tits, toothless mouthes licking shit-encrusted anuses of strangers with a somber tone.
"We're staging a riot inside Rikers Island," said the mayor of Liberty City. "It's totally for educational purposes, and so some of the more sex-starved parking enforcement officers get a chance to gang-rape and strongarm some of the inmates. We will be using humane methods of riot containment, including fire hoses, teargas, poison gel, ferrets wrapped in barbed wire carrying the AIDS virus, brass knuckles, and of course, iron dildoes. There will be t-shirts, refreshments, and we are raffling off a 1994 Chevrolet Cavalier. All of the proceeds to go some Jesus-freak charity to help poor kids who were too stupid to not play in the road or something. Bring the whole family!"
The TV grew hot, the Russian-made tube technology burning smoke and airborne cocaine particles like a motherfucker. I wanted to touch my tongue to the inside of the set, deep inside the lead-lined box containing the super-highball tubes that would blow my fucking body through a wall, cutting the 2x4 studs clean in half like Hurricane Andrew on goofballs. My flesh would stick to the static on the tube like the shroud of turin, until the fucking dog would come in the room and lap the little pieces of my face off of the furniture. Then, the rats. Then bugs, then bacteria. We're all recyclers in the end, even if we threw all of our beer bottles out of the car window our entire lives.
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