Chapter 1

I awoke sometime in the mid afternoon. That I am sure of. When I opened my eyes, there were only two things I could detect- a solid, dark navy blue and the scent of musty nylon. Upon zooming out slightly, I began to see ornate machine-woven stars and the pieces fell together quickly. I sat up, and cans that contained fluids immemorial scattered as the American flag fell off.

“Jesus,” the reverend muttered, appraising my condition. “I thought you’d died. I was just going to leave you in here until you started stinking up the place.”

I pointed at him, tried to say something, but instead decided to try and levitate. I failed and fell back into the cans and the flag. Stand up. Look around you. There’s got to be some kind of point of reference. Plywood, metal springs. Cold, crisp wind with the hint of industrial ruin and golden days long past, never to return. Muncie, Indiana. A literal armpit of the great state distended with booze, grease, broken windows and all the rust and tetanus any grunge fan could ever dream of.

“Get up, man,” the reverend told me. “You’re stinking up the place anyways.”

After a cold shower, I realized whatever had stripped me of my short term memory was consumed, turned into piss and flushed down the toilet and I was thrust onto the cold bosom of this finite hell, forced to stare with unblinking sobriety at the sheer horror of it.

“Get some tacos. That’ll clear you up.”

Tacos.

I stumbled down the hall and swung myself into my consultant’s room.

“Tacos?” I asked, my head cocked at a one hundred and eighty degree angle.

He picked up his briefcase and what I eventually recognized as a chair leg.

“Tacos. Get the bard,” Larry said, referring to our jovial, viking-esque companion.

If I remembered much from the walk there, is was the realization that if there was one good place to look for the American dream, this was it. Muncie was primarily comprised of cheap, deteriorating housing, booze seeping from the ceiling and the cracks in the walls and a counter-culture that would turn a Satanist into a god fearing Baptist, never again to sacrifice a goat in some frozen hay field, a mere two miles away from the Klu Klux Klan convention. American Diversity. You’ve found it, look no further.

Find the American Dream next. It’s in the Wal-Mart, for sure, stacked and keenly organized by price next to the wall of two dollar and fifty cent bum wine that may or may not have been fueling this, just beneath the rollback sign. It tastes like a hamburger and has the calories of exactly one inhalation of air. It puts hair back on your head, keeps you keen during all hours of the night. It keeps you unique, a valued member of society. We probably weren’t twenty minutes from the building and I was already getting bad vibrations. Why do you even look for the dream? When confronted with the terrible, terrible things happening all around you in that town, sometimes it’s what you need to keep going- an affirmation that this isn’t all there is, even if you’re knee deep in it.

Mark, the bard, decided to sit down on a stone wall next to a church’s soccer field.

“This is a good spot,” Larry said, cracking open his briefcase.

I peered inside and found oranges, eight ounce soda cans, baking powder, a few blank CD-Rs and what I can only assume was spaghetti that had been sitting under some psychopathic Asian’s bed for nine months, stewing and just waiting to set him off like some Goddamn nuclear-powered hurricane from hell.

The last time it had happened, I’d been minding my own business, trying to pass the time until I recovered from a cocktail of unmentionable things. There it was- clear freedom. The sky was an ominous gray, foreshadowing what was about to come. A door slammed to my right and I jumped and whirled in my chair to face it. Wind, man. It was wind. Keep cool. I picked up the Auto Trader and it promptly sailed across the room as the door slammed again. And again. And again and then it stayed open and I could see him– clearly a man assembled at the end of the month in Red Heaven to meet the quota. The first three weeks are fine but that last week God’s little human-making elves or whoever the fuck he’s hiring start churning out politicians with forty-seven chromosomes, hippies, the weird fuckers who make love to furniture and this man in particular- one with a massive over heating pro- DUCK. Shit, man, he’s just launched a shelf across the room. Man must have some serious muscle hidden somewhe- he’s dislodged the air conditioner, time to shut the door, lock the door, pray that Ching doesn’t get any angrier and start smashing.

Mark broke my retrospective and handed me the chair leg.

“It’s nice, man. What do you intend?” I asked him.

He said nothing, but lifted two of the oranges and pointed to the field. I understood immediately.

The first orange exploded brilliantly, spraying juice across my sunglasses and shirt. The second one was even better- a Death Star magnitude citrus explosion. Right on. We worked through that stuff pretty quickly, and the vibrations were getting dangerous- destructive, callous, daring. In a town like Muncie, sometimes it’s best to keep those kind of urges under your hat, but I knew with the gentlemen I was traveling with, they’d be worn on sleeves and we’d be running from some cross-eyed Kayne West fans with single digit SAT scores, driving their mom’s Suburban by the time the evening was over.

Our destination was Tillotson Avenue. Tillotson was seemingly constructed to destroy any given person’s proper physique. If you have ever seen any given fast food commerical in your life, the odds are that the restaurant you saw (no matter the alphabet or language) existed on Tillotson Avenue. Ranging from a McDonald’s to an Arby’s to a KFC to a Taco Bell, every major midwestern chain seemed represented there. There were also a few dine-in joints, including a Ponderosa whose lights had gone eternally black. A window had been shattered leaving a man-sized hole with no clue as to how long it’d been that way. Investigation of the interior yielded no evidence. It was as a Mayan temple and we conquistadors of ruin had found no plunder nor any cause as to why there was no plunder.

Down Tillotson, waaay down, past the smiling billboards and shattered steakhouses. I found the line at the Taco Distributionary uneventful other than the blimpish, one toothed biker in front of me, eying– sweet mother of holy Joseph Mary and Jesus, back the fun bus the fuck up. The two girls he’d locked his turgid, bulging, blood-shot eyes on were clearly the first models of the month, chiseled with Michelangelo’s heart and the cold uncaring precision of a machine, clad in spandex and not much of it, to boot. Mark’s attention slowly shifts from the Tacos and Larry has already been looking at them. He’d had no intention of letting either of us know they were there, the rotten bastard.

The burrito in front of me tasted like ambrosia- not that shit your Aunt Helen makes with the jello and oranges and marshmallows and shit, no, man, it was a burrito eternally begotten by God the Father himself. The burrito, of course, was almost entirely synthetic, more machine than burrito. Those sort of things don’t cross your mind when you’re wolfing it down though and it’s good and then it’s done and unless you have the misfortune to think back on it, that is the sum total of your burrito-mankind interaction. The girls stood up, sat down, and moved around the restaurant. I can only speculate that we looked like cats, transfixed by the cat-nip woven rope dangled in front of us.

Larry broke the tension by presenting me with a packet of “Mt. Vesuvius Sauce”.

“You have a vagina,” he said, confidently, smiling.

I emptied the packet onto my taco and devoured it, not even breaking a sweat. Taco Bell’s packeted sauces are a scarlet facade, proclaiming the most intense heat you could possibly hope to experience as a human being without melting to fucking death. In reality, they deliver a mild tingle unless applied directly to the eyes, a lesson I would learn well that very eve.

“You, sir, are in possession of the poon tang,” I replied, equally confident.

“Prove it. Spray this shit in your goddamn eyes,” he said, sliding me another packet.

I was feeling just ballsy enough to agree. I stepped into the restroom (which strongly resembled any given Balkan nation in the steeps of some kind of horrible hygiene genocide) and tore open the packet. Although I don’t remember the exact method of application, to this day I remember immediately that I emerged from the bathroom with eyes red enough to make the Devil’s own seem like some sort of pink, frilly Valentine’s Day “please fuck me” card.

I snatched Larry’s drink from him and began to dab it in my eyes.

“You may never again call anyone a woman,” I said, jabbing a finger at him, trying to find him with what seemed like the red sea parting in my eyes. “That privilege of yours has forevermore been revoked.”

He nodded solemnly, knowing he was utterly defeated for the rest of the evening and likely more to come. Perhaps our testosterone-driven minds would present him with a chance at redemption sometime in the future, but for the time being our focus returned to the spandex-clad women across the room.

They prepared to leave and as they were leaving the vibrations erupted out of Mark.

He stood and began applauding and every eye in the Taco fucking Kingdom locked onto him like a charisma seeking missile.

“Nice ass!” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “Nice ass! Yeah! You! Nice ass! You too! Nice ass!”

Amusement turns to sheer horror and I looked up at him. He was about ninety stories tall and the clapping slowed down. You fool, Mark. You’ve doomed us. Paranoia can wait for justification. We’ll be fine. We’re leaving. We leave.

Not ten steps from the restaurant, two cross-eyed Kanye West fans with single-digit SAT scores hurtled by in their mother’s Suburban with the girls in the back. Slowly but surely, a thirty-two ounce soda sailed through the crisp night air and detonated like a cluster bomb at my feet.

“They’re shooting at us!” I heard Mark, I think, yell. Nachos, cold soda and ice cubes were landing like hot lead around us as we distanced ourselves from their vehicle, which seemed to be shuddering with rage and bass.

As soon as their lumbering hate-wagon had disappeared, a white, boxy car from what I assume was the 1980’s pulled up and four thumbs emerged from the windows with jubilant cheering and indecipherable encouragements.

“They’re cheering us, man,” I said, trying my best to listen.

“D’you think they’ve just been following those other douchemongers around?” Larry asked.

We could only assume so and were actually in the middle of pondering the fact when they made a second pass at us. This one was less severe- it seems they’d thrown the bulk of their weight into the first strafing and assailed us with various sauces, all of which failed to intimidate me, given the previous man-challenge issued to me. The white car made it’s inspirational pass again and that was the last we saw of them for a while.

Chapter 2

—

We were in the microbiology lab the next morning. Given my previous night’s experience, a room filled with flesh-eating bacteria and constricting serpents was hardly a choice environment. I pressed on, though my head seared and the room was bright as if nineteen thousand bright white globes were taking turns fucking the shit out of my eyes with their throbbing photons. Matutinal rays ravished my eyes like I was a cheap Barcelona whore.

The lab head cleared his throat.

“We will be making pipets today,” he said, as the attendant passed out boxes of glass tubes and Bunsen burners.

Larry was convinced that it was a good idea to try to make a bowl, or perhaps a bong for G.I. Joes. I didn’t really endorse his plan but that had never deterred him, usually to my dismay.

The morning was a deep blue blur, vibrationless and vast, like some kind of ocean. I remember burning my hands constantly on hot glass and Larry cursing vibrantly as the miniature bong bubbles burst. The closest to anything he got was still a failure, I remember it clearly- some kind of dentists’ hook looking tool, crafted by some glass-blower maddened by neurosis of working in that city. Many people there killed the edge with strong drink. We were riding on the razor’s edge back then, roaming the town with nothing to calm our raging nerves.

I remember Larry saying something like,

“Hide this bowl,”

and then taking a hot glass tube into my hands,

And then I remember saying something like,

“You goddamn lunatic, why would you hand me glowing glass?”

His desideratum was shattered as I hurtled the glowing glass bowl at him. It shattered on a wall across the room.

He hurtled his first project, the hook at me, and it bounced harmlessly off my coat and onto the table.

“Jesus God, man, do you know what that thing is?!” I think I said, recoiling in what was probably horror.

His response amounted to “No”.

“This thing,” I probably muttered, perchance raising the glass hook to my eye. “Is a goddamn ass-grabber, man. See, you ought to use this when someone’s got a stick up their ass. You can pull it out. Shit, man, they make big ones out of I-beams for folks like prosecutors.”

He was laughing and that’s when I sobered up. Something wet was on my hand. Some kind of anxiety-inducing elixer. We were in a room filled with the most vile, destructive microbes on the planet. Even the Manson family wouldn’t plant this shit in your salad. I became gripped with paranoia, striking quickly enough to earn me a prescription for whatever the fuck they’re giving bi-polar folks these days. What the fuck was this goddamn juice?

I screamed something.

“Larry, what the fuck is this juice!”

He was pretty mirthful at my predicament. I could already feel my skin cells turning into filet mignon for some mongoloid flesh-eating bacteria, sweeping across my skin like Genghis Khan and the Golden Hordes. In ten minutes, I’d be a red puddle muddled with pink on the floor, staining what used to be my clothes. Horror was etched into my features. Wash it off, man, WASH IT OFF. SCRUB.

“Is there a problem here?” the attendant asked over my shoulder. The dread only multiplied. My pupils collapsed in on themselves and became black holes.

“No. NO PROBLEMS HERE.” I said, pausing and then smiling. “Just bent on scrubbing the flesh off my bones.”

“You’re doing a good job,” he said.

I turned to find my hand red and raw. I smiled nervously and nodded.

“Go away,” I said.

The weird fucker turned and left. I looked at my reddened hand and sighed. Palmela Handerson would be lonely tonight. The lab section was over soon enough.

As I was walking back from the lab, I was able to detect from a distance protesters on a street corner along my path, in front of a dilapidated warehouse marked “UNCLE FESTER’S HOUSE OF MEAT”. I couldn’t quite make out their signs, but as I grew closer, much to my dismay, it became clear that they were abortion protesters with a picture of a mutilated baby. These people had shat all over my appetite and common decency at the same time.

I approached them.
There were three of them there– one was a beachball-esque woman, almost a perfect cellulite sphere. The other girl was tall and thin with mutton chops straight out of London in 1874. The third was a completely normal fellow. I knew immediately there had to be something wrong with him- why else would these titans of the odd accompany him?

I knew then immediately what I had to do. I ran to the nearest hobby shop, purchased a large slab of poster board, a dowel rod, and some tape. A trip to the poster store next door yielded the crux of my plan- a two by three foot poster of a delicious, juicy red steak, lovingly seasoned with pepper and garnishes. I taped the dowel rod onto the poster board, taped the steak picture on the front and scrawled “DOWN WITH JONATHAN SWIFT” above the steak and join them in the picket line.

“I, too, am against the exploitation of babies,” I said, gesturing to my sign.

We shake hands. The modern English gentleman girl introduced herself as Sarah and shook my hand. The beachball woman shook my hand as well- it was coated with a thick layer of what I hope to this day was cooking oil. The lone male with them shook my hand without giving me his name. I asked him it. He looked, down avoiding eye contact.

“Gandolf.”

I was to say the least incredulous.

“Gandolf? What, seriously?” I asked, my cigarette falling to the ground as a result of my slacked jaw. My eyebrows were so high that The Rock must have seemed like an emotionless, botox stuffed soap opera diva.

He shruged and hesitated. “Eh… yeah.”

“Give me your driver’s license,” I told him, holding out my hand.

“GANDOLF JACKSON” was printed neatly next to all of his vital data. I held the license up to him to compare the images.

It was about that point when I heard a miserable cacophony from down the way- what was it? I couldn’t put my finger on it. The noise grew closer and it suddenly became lucid.

Kanye West! Those rotten bastards had found me! There was no escape now!

“Run!” I shouted as a can of Diet Sugar Free Sprite Zero One Plus Nineteen Essential Vitamins and Minerals sailed narrowly over my head and exploded against a street post. “It’s the goddamn mongoloids! Rotten bastards!”

The red suburban took out an almost-comicly placed fruit stand and rounded the corner after me.

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First draft of the first two chapters of the book I'm writing. Critz or b&.