SLOSH: Part 3

CHAPTER TEN
SDRAWKCAB

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client
-William S. Burroughs

         Addiction is like a bitchy wife. She is there, nagging you all the time. She is the one that wakes you up from your cat naps. She’s the one that makes you throw up your food and scream in pain. The sex doesn’t even feel good anymore, you just need it to feel normal.
         On all fours, screaming to hell “please let it stop!” I am denied as acid churns and burns a little more inside my gut and I cough and scream and spit and let the vomit all run out in gushing intensity.
         I know now that I can trust few or none. The society is threatening me, something they’ve never done before, and this twisted Ray Gin fucker cold cocked me, so I don’t know where I stand.
         The society threatened me with death. I know that this is an empty threat. The real punishment I will receive if I fail them is sure to be much worse.

         I thank thee Lord, I thank thee that Madeline is gone. I thank thee that she has not suffered this torment by my side.
         How did her note put it?
In a better place.


         Snap back to days of Slosh. It sinking into my veins and causing me more pain and confusion and skull fucked ecstasy than I can describe. It filling up my brain, my head feels waterlogged and falls to one side. My eyes go up but my muscles give out and I collapse into a pissing, shitting, drooling, sobbing mess on the floor. This is the drop. This is where Slosh leaves you.
         Get some more. Feel like God. Write a report.

My report (from earlier in my life):

         Dear brothers of the society
This marriage and my commitment to fidelity has left me with no mistress other than the temperamental slosh. Why won’t you help me? Give me something else to do. Anything!

Sincerely
Homes Jinn

         Dear Mr. Jinn
Your mission is to stay a faithful husband and father. Your Slosh supply will be refilled weekly, your cash flow daily. We will not require anything from you for quite some time.

Sit tight.

The Eco Cull Eegerr society.

         My home and my brain have both become junctions for the insane.
         The society.
         Ray Gin.
         And now this…

As I lay, post masturbatorily filthy on my floor, tired and thinking about what to do with all the shit coming down on me, my mail slot kicks open and a scrap of paper flutters in and on to the floor.
         I pull myself over to it like a paraplegic without a chair. It’s a note, scrawled in red handwriting.

It reads:

To begin I will tell of rain and how it fell that night. Hard and fast and unmerciful in a comforting sort of way, just like his face and his fist and his everything. And he was there too, next to me, lying there holding me, saying “trust me baby it will all be okay” and it wasn’t, but that’s what he told me, and I listened because I was young and stupid and needed him, so bad

So bad.

And then, with the rain, and the thunder, and the striking lightning,

The other one came

And killed the man who lay next to me…

And then, two months later, I was with the other one, the one who had killed. The one who came with the thunder. And he was pointing to a mattress on the ground of a cheap motel room and saying “this is where you turn your tricks” and I looked back at him with nothing behind my eyes and I said “okay” with likewise nothingness in my voice.

And I turned them all.

And then I killed him one night, when the rain came back and with the thunder I felt him, the one from before who had held me close and told me that it would all be okay, and the lighting filled my veins, and I tore his fucking head to the side,

Crack, snap, something made the noise of finality and his eyes went creamy white and he went limp.

And I felt nothing.

And then I was on my own, I didn’t have too much at that point, so I kept on turning those tricks, on the same mattress, but I made more money. What felt good now was that I wasn’t doing it for him (the one I killed) anymore.

And then one day, I took a cab out to the graveyard and I walked out through the mushy grass, because it was raining that day (thankfully however there was no lightning, no thunder), out to the grave of the man who had held me so close that night and told me that everything would be okay, and I looked down at that slab of stone that was supposed to sum his whole life up.

And I said to it “you were wrong” and I dropped a bundle of roses and walked away.

And that’s my story.

See you soon.

Yours truly,
Lucy Dobbs

         I feel backwards as I fall backwards. The house smells backwards and everything sounds so fucking backwards.

“Explain everything to me Doctor Lars” I say.
“Well” Doctor Lars begins “what would you like to know?”
“Well for starters” I say “what’s the deal with Slosh?”
Doctor Lars chuckles. “You’ve had it in your system so much, why don’t you tell me!?”
I clock Doctor Lars a hard one right across the side of his head.
“Don’t fuck with me Lars! I’m in no mood! What the fuck is Slosh! What the fuck was I putting into my body!”
Doctor Lars looks up at me, his hands over his eye. “Who’d you buy it from?” he asks me. I don’t understand the point of the question but I answer it.
“I never bought it. The society gave it to me.” Doctor Lars pulls an ice pack out of his freezer and puts it over his eye.
“By the society I assume you mean Eco Cull Eegerr” says Doctor Lars.
“Of course” I say back.
“Well” says Doctor Lars. “Slosh is a slang term for Psilosergic Acid Phenethylamine. It is usually ingested through the mouth in a liquid form, but it can be smoked, injected, snorted, shoved up the ass, it doesn’t matter it all works. It’s an intense Psychedelic, dissociative and sedative. It renders you stupid, puts other people in control of your life. That’s why they fed it to you.”
As he says this I remember something Ray Gin said to me.

“They’re playing you Othello style”

“Slosh works to take you out of the control room. It puts you in the backseat and lets someone else take over.”
I think about this. “What if no one else takes over?” I ask Doctor Lars.
“Well” he begins “then another part of yourself takes over”.
Blink, blink, breathe, breathe.

I am Ray Gin.

“Mr. Jinn I do believe you’ve played the fool” says Doctor Lars and he laughs and my blood boils and I clock him again. This time he doesn't just take it. After recovering he lunges at me, a shiny little silver blade wedged between his fingers.
“Assault me once, shame on you” he says slicing through the air towards me. “Assault me twice, shame on me…for not slicing the shit out of you the first time!” The blade comes down and cuts my left eye right across. The eye pops open and goes out. I scream as blood runs down. Anger runs up. I gain strength with precision I redirect Doctor Lars’s hand right up into his own neck. Blood sprays out all over me and it tastes salty and thick. He sputters a little and then lets go of life. He falls to the floor.
My left eye is gone, there is blood all over me, I have just killed a man, and I have learned that the society is against me. They have been keeping me as catatonic as possible. They have been doping me up.
         I take the keys off of Doctor Lars’ desk and I unlock his drawers. That’s where I find the file I’m looking for.

Bold label across the front:

The History of
PSILOSERGIC ACID PHENETHYLAMINE
AKA Slosh, Sosh, Saucy, Trapto, Ocu, Leeg, or Kitana

         It reads:

PSILOSERGIC ACID PHENETHYLAMINE is a sap extracted from the Vatovat Weed of South America. First used by the Kaktu tribe of the Amazon river for ceremonial and medicinal purposes, known to them as Leeg.
         During a territorial battle among the native people of the region, the Kaktu were slaughtered by the Ixtansana tribe of the Northern plain. The Ixtansana raided the village of the Kaktu and discovered large jugs of the harvested sap. They named it Ocu (pronounced Oh Koo) and when the white man came, it was traded for tobacco and Christianity.
         The Spanish settlers mixed the Ocu with their coffee, only they called it Trapto. Trapto was not allowed as a general rule, but highly consumed anyway, even by high officials.
         A settler named Wilson Tibbs was the first to discover the phenomenal beneficial properties of Trapto. He realized that it was not just a substance that could put one into a little daze for a while or help get one to sleep, but rather the most amazing drug known to man. He realized why the Kaktu had been slaughtered so easily, and why the Ixtansana, once an aggressive and strong tribe, had given in so quickly to the settlers. It was because Trapto was a drug that took the self away from the self.
         Wilson Tibbs knew that this meant the drug had to be used to fight the evil in the world. Surely Trapto could be slipped into the drinks of the evil tyrants of the earth, who could then be persuaded to resign or to instill democracy or encourage peace. To Wilson Tibbs, Trapto was the solution to all evil.
         Wilson Tibbs was fed lethal doses of Trapto and then buried quickly. Those that killed him wanted to steal his discovery for their own purposes.
         It wasn’t hard to enslave the African people and bring then to the Americas after loading up their fellow tribesman on Saucy, as the first colonial settlers of North America called it. Through simply “sharing” the saucy with the Africans, it was a piece of cake to convince one tribesman to betray another, until a grand market of slavery was booming across the seas.
         Nowadays it’s a deadly weapon. Some call it Slosh or Sosh, some call it Kitana or Nightshade. In the 1960’s the hippies liked to call it the Purple Chain, and Malcolm X once referred to it as “the overseer’s whip in the form of candy.”
         So who uses Psilosergic Acid Phenethylamine as a weapon these days? The government. The CIA. The FBI. The military. The police. And, of course, The Eco Cull Eegerr society. They’ve got you by the balls. Yes I’m talking to you Homes Jinn. Turn around.

I flip around scared at what I might see. Standing there is Morgan Featherstone, my late wife. She lights a hand rolled cigarette and smiles. “Hey big boy” she says. “Long time no see.” She glows like the angel she is, an homage to death, an homage to dirt and worms and stagnate pulses, she glows on, despite what she is. She hands a little box to me.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Something I knew you’d need” she says.
I open up the box. Inside lies an eye patch.
“Thanks” I say. I slip the patch over the bloody orifice where Doctor Lars popped my sight out. I feel like a pirate. I smile at Morgan, trying to get her to smile back and laugh with me at myself and how ridiculous I look. Her face grows gravely serious.
“Someday I may be able to forgive you for the fact that you killed me, someday I may be able to forgive you for the fact that you romanced me just for sex, but I will never be able to forgive you for letting Madeline go.”
My veins go icy and I am frozen shame. “She’s in a better place” I say, whisper trailing out pathetically.
Morgan points her finger at me. “She barely got away” she says to me, scathing sternness in her tone. “She was always a smart little girl. Knew when to get out of dangerous situations”. I hang my head and think of the daughter I let disappear.
“Well, she didn’t get that intuition from me” I say. Morgan smiles and the glow sets in gently.
“Ain’t that the truth” she says.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Checker Board Building
         
         THE FLOW BEGINS
A poem by Lucy Dobbs

The flow begins as do my sins
With blessed synchronicity

They mesh and cry and burn and sing
About their now clipped angel wings

They choose to stay upon the dirt
Although the glow is beautiful

to See the High and sunny sky
they stay and wish away these thoughts

and that is why, they chose to stay
I said to them “please, go away”

They made me sad because they had
A choice that so few others made

But begged instead that I would take
My shears and cut away the wings

That bound them to the sky
Like prisoners, locked up on high

We look up now and see the wanderers
Who float about and dream and say

“I wonder if some amber day in dreams
my feet will touch the ground”

While people looking up, up at the clouds
Up at the floating air and heat

They think of how they want to glide
And take a windy ride, deciding now

That moving on from daydreams
Night dreams leading just to more screams

Daily heard from missing children, beaten wives
Do I entreat to list some more

The missing whore from down the block
With ratty socks who walks

As though she has some weird disease
That slowly eats away her knees

But she is just a misled whore of
Disproportioned grace, without a face

Without a name, without a claim
To anything a human being has, you are,

Just what you own and nothing more, but nothing less
You rich and popular good man

The rich man now took off her dress
The shaky whore, whose clipped wings fluttered as she shook

Was now (with hypothermia) standing ready
Now descending.

And so settle now, lay down, sweet child, I’ll clip your wings tomorrow

Till then dream about the ground
And leave the sky to God and harpies

         The Social Liabilities Office at Society Headquarters was a big gray building with guards at every door and security cameras scanning every which way. A big sign in front of the building displayed the name of the building:

S.L.O.S.H.

         Something drew me to this place. Something woke me up from my daze, threw up to my feet and handed me that briefcase that Ray Gin gave me. Something opened up that briefcase and gave me the six shooter inside, and now, here I was, about to get some fucking answers. The gun was loaded and I approached the left flank guards slowly. One was dozing the other was teetery eyed but awake. It didn’t take much. Snuck up behind, slammed down the butt on his neck and he went out like a candle. The other guard stirred but did not awaken. I took his key and opened the door, nimbly avoiding the eyes of the cameras.
         I was in one long hall with a black and white checkerboard floor, and checkerboard walls and a checkerboard ceiling and I felt like a piece. I was standing on a little black square. A voice rang over the intercom.
         “Intruder at point A7”. The square on which I stood glowed a deep red and my feet began to burn. I ran. Each square upon which I stepped glowed a deep red and burned me. My toes blistered. I aimed the gun ahead, ready to kill my opposition.
         A wheelchair came careening around the corner and right towards me. In it was the bloody corpse of Doctor Lars. I skittered around it and kept moving. Next, bodies came rolling, stiff after stiff, Mari Larkson, Jackie, Rachel Cline, Morgan, every fuck I’d ever had, dead and rolling right beneath my legs. Seeing all their cold and sterile faces brought me down a notch, and I slowed myself and fought the tears.
         This is when they got me. I heard the footsteps coming as I stood there, frozen in the Checkerboard building, trying not to cry. The bodies of my lovers were now circling me with increasing speed. I tried not to look, but each of them smelled like they had when we had tossed between the sheets, so I couldn’t fight it. All I could do was scream “enough!” and the bodies stopped moving and they fell to the ground and quickly decomposed away into nothing. I heard laughter coming form far away and the sound of footsteps moving towards me. Loud resounding footsteps, the kind made by dress shoes.
         My mentor, the man in the blue suit turned the corner and faced me. “You’ve always been such a good worker for the society Homes. What the hell happened to you! Now you’re here trying to pull some shit! You know this action can’t go unpunished. I’m afraid I have no choice but to exact the worst punishment imaginable upon you. Otherwise, you’ll never learn.” He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a little slip of paper. He puts on his spectacles, clears his throat and begins to read.

“Her full name is Seneca Margot Cummings. She lives at 338 Westing Place, Lombard Illinois. She is currently 20 years old and attending…”

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Click. Click. Click.

“You stupid motherfucker! That’s all I had to live for!”
         The society is clever in their organization. They are clever in their recruitment. They are clever in their clean ups. But they are most clever in their punishments. 
         I stumble over to my mentors blue and bloody corpse and I take my time to mash his skull and brains down with repeated blows from the butt of my gun.
         “What a mess” says a voice to my left. Instinctually I jump back and raise the gun in front of me. There stands a woman, tall, curvy, unbelievably sexy. Her hair is red and long and curls all around her. She wears a business suit, pink and fitting.
“Oh stop kidding me” she says. “There’s no ammo in that gun.” She’s right and we both know it so I put the gun down.
“Follow me” she says. “I think there’s something you’d like to see”.
“Wait!” I say, a little shaken from everything that’s happened. “Who the hell are you!?”
She turns around and looks confused. “Isn’t it obvious” she says, with sultry tones and tongue curls. “I’m Lucy Dobbs. I’m your attorney.”
         She takes me to a room with nothing in it but a chair and a television. She pushes me down into the chair and turns the TV on. She pushes a cassette into the VCR and she presses play.
         The screen lights up, the picture comes on. It’s me, lying naked on an operating table. I look dead or fucked up as hell on something. Nothing happens until suddenly a hand holding a scalpel comes from the left and slices a thin little line right across my forehead. Another hand comes from the right and pulls the top of my head up and off. There is my brain, pink and bloody. The hand coming from the left takes the scalpel and hovers with it right above my brain. Then the hand stabs down and messily cuts a huge chunk of my brain off. He holds it in his hands and squeezes it.

The screen goes static. I am frozen to my seat. My eyes are wide. I feel so empty headed all of the sudden. The room spins. Lucy walks in front of the screen and eyes me, checking my condition.
“How you feel babe” she says. I look up at her.
“What the hell happened to my brain! What the fuck was that!?”
“This!” she screams throwing the TV over onto it’s side, smashing it to bits, revealing a large vat behind it, a vat with a chunk of a pinkish gray tissue floating in it. “This is what happened to it! Here it is!”
         It’s my brain. It’s the part they cut out and it’s right in front of me. Seeing is believing and I see a piece of who I am severed from me and floating in some preservatory fluid. This piece of my brain is labeled in big bold letters. The label reads:

I AM RAY GIN

         I feel like my throat decides to strangle itself as I turn to Lucy, breathless. “what” I whisper. “what is this!?”
         
“It’s Ray Gin” she says. “It’s the part of you that they cut out.”




































CHAPTER TWELVE
LUCY DOBBS

         Leaning over me, dead in the gutter, under the bridge, the three men spit and smoke and laugh.

         Lucy Dobbs is my attorney. She freelances and she is here to bring reason to my rhyme.
“Two days ago” I say “I murdered a certain Doctor Lars, in cold blood.”
“We’ll pass it off as self-defense” says Lucy carelessly. “Nothing we can’t handle”.
I swallow hard. “That’s not the only person I’ve killed in the past week however. I’ve also murdered my wife under the pretext of supposed infidelity as well as a close colleague of mine under suspicion of child pornography trafficking. I believe that both suspicions that motivated my extermination of these two are false, and I believe that I was set up by the society to commit these murders”.

They’re playing you Othello style.

“Nothing we can’t fix” says Lucy, making a quick mark with her pen across a legal pad. “Now” she says. “Three days ago your late wife contacted you. Am I right?”
“Was it three days ago?” I think “I have no sense of days or nights, minutes seconds, decades or years anymore. Everything is just now. No future but tomorrow.”
“Yes, she contacted me” I say. “I mean I guess she did, I thought I was hallucinating, but I guess if you know about it then it really happened.”
Lucy makes another mark with her pen. “Just because I know about it” she says “doesn’t mean it wasn’t a hallucination. In fact it probably was.”
I swallow hard again. “Lucy” I begin “why am I so fucked up? Why am I hallucinating and killing people and living in a depth of my brain where there’s nothing and no one and no control? I mean, it would make sense of I was still on Slosh, but I’m not! I kicked that habit eight months ago!”
Lucy laughs. “No you didn’t.” she says. “You think you did, but that’s because you’re fucked up” she says, chuckling, thinking it’s so goddamn hilarious. I cry silently for about three seconds and then wipe the tears and ask “how the hell do I come down! How the hell do I get off the stuff!”
Lucy looks up at me. “No easy answer to that, sugar” she says.

         Dear Mr. Homes Jinn,
Your murder of our agent Stilton James, or as you knew him, your mentor, the man in the blue suit, was top notch. Well done! We have no choice, however, but to regard you as an adversary now. Thusly, your annihilation has been ordered. Farewell old sport.

Watch your back.

The Eco Cull Eegerr society.

         Lucy carries matching revolvers in her garter. She wears short skirt that moves with the slightest gust of wind. She keeps a switchblade in her bra and a razor blade, facing out, inside of her vagina so that any potential rapist gets seriously emasculated.
         She is too bad ass to be real, and I doubt that she is.
         “We need to talk about how to get you out of this tight mess, Mr. Jinn” she says. “I think that we can narrow it down to three options.

Option number one: You apologize for your transgressions, you down as much Slosh as they tell you to, and you resign yourself back into automatonical servitude for the society.

Option number two: You meet Ray Gin and, with his consent, kill him.

Option number three: You and me gear up, join The Great Leader, and blast the society to shit.”

         She smiles as she finishes speaking.  Clearly option three is her forte. Option one is not an option at all.
“Why do I need Ray Gin’s consent to kill him?” I ask. She suddenly looks very serious. “Because if you don’t get him to consent, then it could get very messy and you could end up killing yourself in the process.” She is probably right, but option two still seems best. “I’ll meet Ray Gin” I say and she looks unhappy with my decision. “Alright” she says “lets give him a ring”. She stands up and walks away, that perfect hourglass figure swinging back and forth as she walks. I stop and decide to see if she is my creation.
“Get naked” I say and she stops dead in her tracks. She turns around and faces me.
“What?” she says with incredulousness in her voice.
“I said get naked. Strip. Take off your clothes and bend over this table so I can fuck you” I say motioning to her desk. She moves towards me. If she is nothing but a figment of my mind, a derivative of this endless day dream, she will obey me.
         She clocks me hard across the face and I fall to the ground, my nose bleeding profusely. “So you are real” I say, holding back the flow.
“Honey” she begins, standing over me with one leg cocked “I’m as real as it gets.”

         We end up pressed closely together in a payphone, our cheeks touching as both of our ears push through to get a close hear at the top of the phone. Ring, ring, ring, ring, “hello?”.
“Ray Gin?” I say.
“I am Ray Gin” says the voice.
“Hello Mr. Gin, this is Homes Jinn, we need to meet.”
Ray Gin clears his throat. “I agree” he says. “What do you want to talk to me about?”
“Well” I say, and this is a hard thing to explain to a man over the phone “I need to discuss how you’d feel about me killing you.” I say these words very quickly as if they’re dirty and I want to get them out of my mouth.
I hear Ray Gin swallow. “Coffee at nine A.M. tomorrow. The Kaktu Café”.
Dial tone.
Lucy smiles. “Coffee sounds nice” she says.
I look over at her. “Yeah I guess” I say.
“You probably shouldn’t have any, it doesn’t mix well with Slosh, but you can always lean over and smell my cup if that makes you feel better.”
I look at her, slightly confused. “Are you coming with me to meet Ray Gin tomorrow?”
She looks astounded that I didn’t realize this. “Of course!” she says, somewhat vehemently. With this she pulls up her skirt, revealing black lingerie and her two revolvers. “You’re going to need back up”.

         I know how to do two things well. Suck dicks and slit throats.
-Lucy Dobbs’ resume



CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Too Risky

         Things are so crazy right now that it’s just too risky to waste my time with unlucky numbers. We better move on.











































CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Great Leader

Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality; Genghis Khan has sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilisation asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I shall shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent.
-Adolph Hitler

                   
         Move on to the street pigeons with their cluck cluck heads and their bread crumb brawls, and as we roll through union square I watch one pigeon quickly snap it’s head right into another pigeon’s eye leaving a pulpy orifice of blood and uselessness where sight used to be. The pigeon shrieks quickly and flaps its wings, but soon regains it’s composure and goes about it’s scavenging as though it never had that eye.
         I never had my eye set for the next event, when Jackie went insane.
         It started with a high pitched sound that resounded all around us tightly packed inside that metal dungeon, zooming right on down. A light shriek we could barely hear. Jackie began to scream, and junky said “hey girl chill out” but Jackie just began to slam her head into the seat in front of us and scream “I need my fix! I fucking need…”

         In pretty chains that hold me back I look up at the officer. His black and white suit runs down on me and he makes me feel so strangely lonely.

         Back in time, 0.015, that means, of all things

D. U. I.

         “But sir, I promise I am just on my way back from church communion. Can’t you understand sir, it was just a single sip of wine!!!”
“I’m sorry” says the officer “I have to teach you now, that what you do, whatever it may be, is criminal inside my eyes.”
         As teenagers we learn that the police are our enemies. Who teaches us this? The police themselves. They criminalize us, knocking us over for not wearing helmets, making us go to rehab for sipping a beer, citing us for “vandalism” when we carve our names into a tree.
         They bring the hate upon themselves. They teach us “if you see the siren, or the suit, or the car, if you so much as smell a cop, you get prepared, you push to run, you fit to fight.”

         And so, in pretty chains that hold me back I look up at the officer and he says “so this girl her name is Jacqueline? What happened?” as though it’s my fault.
         “I don’t know” I begin “she went insane I guess, you see she was stuck on the drugs and I think they may have taken her way back”. The officer he makes a mark and says “you use drugs too?” and I say “I don’t have to answer that” and he says “yes you do”.

         “The Great Leader” says Jackie. “He has come to guide me in the ways of peace”. She teeters back and forth inside the little room they stuck her in. She wears a jacket, nice and white, that makes her hug herself, and I look at her and I cannot help but start to cry.
         
         “Leave him for public sanitation” says the blonde man.

         Eyebrows go up and pupils go down, and the checkerboard building spirals all around me. Jackie comes out of one of the nearby rooms. She is in a nightgown and she looks radiant. “Come with me Homes” she says. “Come see the Great Leader”.

         I sit across from my psychologist.
“Hear from the Eco Cull Eegerr society lately Homes?” he asks me, playing into what he thinks is a stupid delusion as though I’m some little child. I answer frankly.
“They’re trying to kill me”
He eyes me strangely and then taps the clipboard. “I want to go back to something quickly Homes. You said that you never developed a fear of rejection and you believe that that lack of a fear may be the root of your recklessness. Have you ever been rejected Homes? Have you ever had an experience where you ‘played your game’ but the girl just wasn’t interested?”
I think about it:

I walked into the room that night and it was black and white and boring as hell. Suits and ties and sad eyes that well up with tears brought on by years of money making and infidelity and champagne and death, their parents, or grandparents most likely, leaving them a fat sum and fat lot of time to do nothing with except maybe buy your bubbly blond daughter tennis lessons or get that boy of yours a full ride to Yale. Fucking disaster is what I felt like. Shelving my books every night, toking up, falling asleep early and waking with a bad taste in my mouth and an acrid smell in the air. All these successful suits. These waspy debutantes, and here I was some rebel, or so I fancied myself, coming into the mix to drink and toast and be merry. I was only sixteen, and the judgment was already smashing down. And this party, this sad pathetic mess of old men with their compensating cars and their trophy wives, each with a steady flow of little trophies, ornaments, 12 inch pearls, white gold necklaces, designer dresses, all purchased by the husband under the assumption that well fed women give it up, and keep giving it up no matter how old and decrepit you get. Just hold onto your green.
But I guess that I was being a bit overly cynical. After all, it wasn’t like I couldn’t look at the newly presented beauty queens with their crew cut, polo shirt, big gunned, wine aficionado boyfriends and condescend enough to feel a tinge of deification, a little bit of holiness, for I was not slave to this endless tirade of tradition, I was free from it, a wanderer out in the mist.
Melodrama in my head.
But I had yoinked some Pinot Grigio and had convinced the bartender I was old enough for a White Russian twice. This helped me to float through the gathering a little more willingly, a little more bearably. Summer was a bitch, but I stuck it out.
And then I locked green eyes with Jackie and that was that. She moved across the room slowly and…
          …she said “you look a bit stumbly. You also look unfamiliar”. I turned to her and extended my hand. Her lips moved up into a smile for about half a second, a fleeting little tinge of something, something that seemed to be intended for me personally, some little change of the face that seemed to be, like a wink, some invitation to some secret thought or idea, and then she took my hand in hers and grasped it tightly. “I’m a friend of a friend” I said “but you can call me Homes”. 
         Eyelids fluttered like the flight of a butterfly, down and down and down they went and her lashes seemed to curl towards me, as did her energy. And there was another smile, another fleeting smile, just for me. And in that moment while our hands were clasped, I was happy. And then

He




                        Ruined




                                                Everything


         He came up behind her, there he was, there he is, there he still is in my mind, (prep fuck!) big and tall and blonde and polo shirt wearing motherfucker, who puts his arm right around her, his forearms bulging from games of tennis down at “the club”. I saw him and I wanted to preempt our introduction, I wanted to fucking knock his lights out, and see him bleeding on the floor while I jumped on top again and kept going, proving that I had strength (I would do this later, but I didn’t know that at the time), that these blonde bastards with their scholarships and infidelities could not best me.
         He moved over to her and put his arm around her, looking down at me and holding her close with that possessive stance. Son of a bitch.
         “Hey man, I’m Cliff” he said, with that classic football player barrotone voice. And I forced the smile through the viscous resistance in my head and let it out, bearing my pearly whites and straining the words “nice to meet you, I’m Homes” through them.
  And then they twirled and walked back to where they belonged.
         And I walked back to where I belonged, at the bar.

:“Sort of” I say to my psychologist. “But I won in the end.”

         I sit next to Jackie. We are in a dark room with two chairs and a stage. We sit in the chairs. We are waiting for the Great Leader. Jackie is already shaky with anticipation. I turn to her. “Jackie do you know that I saved you once? Well twice actually if you count the breakdown in the cab, which didn’t really end too well so I guess the only thing I really saved you from there was death, but do you remember the first time, do you remember when I saved you in the moonlight?”
She turns and looks at me and I know there is nothing in that head but she still seems to really care about what I am saying.
“No. When did you save me?” she asks and her eyes twinkle and her smile widens and her teeth show, and she is the most beautiful girl to ever live.

…the prep fuck trying to steal my perfection saying with a braying phrase sacked out like rabid dogs toward my balls, “fuck you, she’s mine!” and Jackie is too drunk to say otherwise, so I take out my knife, Swiss made and take a slash at prep fucks face and blood drips down and I take out the screwdriver that comes inside the package as well and as the prep fuck regains rage and tries to take my place I drive my fist through air and wind and all resistance until it stops at face and skin and bone and blood and slams the prep fuck back and to the ground whereas I leapt upon him and continued beating till the prep fuck moved no more, his eyes closed, and the breathing stopped, and then I left, with haste, as prep fucks prep fuck friends surrounded him, and I wonder now if he is dead.

         “You never really wanted him did you Jackie? You wanted me right?”
“Shhhh!” she says, one finger in front of her lips. “He’s here.” And the Great Leader steps onto the stage.

         Gentle pink eyes and stubble. Floppy black hair and big teeth. Softly dark skin and dimples. The Great Leader stands before us.
“No more Stalins” he says. “No more Hitlers” he says. “No more Mussolinis” he says. He steps down off the stage. “No more Ecos” he says. “No more Culls” he says. “No more Eegerrs” he says. He paces towards me.
“The future is now my brother and the society is in remission. Our strengths lie in our knowledge, our weaknesses in our temper. We must keep our cool.
“Surely you must understand that the society will be more bloodthirsty than any of us could ever imagine being. They will slaughter your hope and your love of life. They will kill every part of you but that which keeps you living in the most rudimentary sense, and then, they will see to it that you finish yourself off.
“We must act now, time is a factor too imperative to the grand plan to be thought of in and of itself to a farther extremity, as a statement such as ‘later’ is just confusing. I am sure that all of us soldiers have lost track of the time, of the place, of who we are all together. We must get this back my brothers. We must learn who we are, because, as our enemy has taught us, if you know who you are, you know everything.
“Their greatest strength is our expendability. We are worthless flies to them, pesky vermin to be fumigated away. To us, they are mighty Gods who can only be toppled by a complete volte-face, a mighty tergiversation that will joggle the very foundation of the society, snapping it’s support like matches and bringing it to it’s knees. Brothers we must rise!”

`The Great Leader throws his hands into the air and freezes. He breathes deeply three times and then wipes his brow.

“Peace is a beautiful thing. In all instances Peace must be the first option. Peace then War then Peace. There is no Peace here. There is no Peace in our blood or their blood. There is no Peace in the Slosh they force into us or the people they take from us. We must all drain them from our bodies in a grand catharsis. Farewell my brothers, stay strong, and never forget who you are.”

         The Great Leader exits the stage and the curtains close behind him. Jackie is wide eyed in wonderment. She looks vapid.
         The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Great Leader. Perhaps my way out.

For you, gentlemen, fame and honour are beginning as they have not since centuries. Be hard, be without mercy, act more quickly and brutally than the others. The citizens…must tremble with horror. That is the most human way of conducting a war. For it scares the others off.
-Adolph Hitler












CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As Real As It Gets

         “Take off that ridiculous eye patch” says Lucy, placing her purse on the chair and sitting down on the end of the bed to take off her shoes.
“You don’t want to see what’s underneath” I say. “Doctor Lars slashed it open. It’s a bloody mess.”
She looks up at me exasperatedly, trying to get her left boot off. “You’re a slow learner aren’t you” she says.
“Take off the fucking patch. Right now!” she commands.
I take it off, and the room shifts into a two eyed focus.
“My eye” I say. “It’s back! Completely healed!”
Eyebrows go up and Lucy slaps them with a smile of “told you so”.
“But” I begin, but stop, because explanations aren’t so ample these days.
         Lucy is in a sparkly red dress. She leans back against the bed. She opens her legs.

How is she real? She is in every way a creation of mine!

         It is always there, warm and welcoming, as you fill it you throw nerves to such a level that no sound can consecrate itself within that shrill conception. It will be warm. You know that. It will be so warm, so perfect, meant to fit.

         Lucy Dobbs is extraterrestrially graceful (millipede of a word). She moves with a swing to her like a ratatat of the keys. She cruises through the air as though she glides on nothing. She is a zephyr, a passing breeze, a puff of cloud. She is light as a feather and dense as a woman. She curves like a Gentle S from the side and a double eight from the back. She is like a dream that floated out of my head and into reality while I remained behind to dream some more. So long did I stay in this dream world that, ironically and pathetically enough, my escaped dream had to come back and guide me out. And here she is.
“Is that what you are?” I say. “You can’t really be real. You are from my mind, right?”
She crosses her legs. “I’m as real as you are” she says.
I laugh. “That isn’t saying much. I could be a fleeting dream in an old man’s last hour. I could be a piece of dust floating somewhere out in space. I could be a worm, living inside a San Pedro cactus, born into a life of constant hallucination and euphoria.”
“Hey!” she shouts interrupting me. “That’s the kind of thinking we’ve got to get you to quit. That’s the kind of thinking that’s keeping you where you are! Fucked up and never coming down! Get your head out of the clouds and get back to fucking earth!” 
And she pants and pants and pants and pants like the bitch she is.
I sit back slowly in the chair. I quiver and I still myself and look at her like an ashamed parent. “What was it like for you when you got out of here? What was so fucking bad that you get to act as though none of the rest of us, stuck here in the depths of ourselves, have had it hard too!?”
Breathe. Breathe. She looks at me daringly. She lights a cigarette and blows a smoke ring the shape of a heart.
“I fell in love, of course” she says. “I was stupid to think I could make it out there as a lawyer. I knew that in here was the only place that I knew the law. I fell in love with a man who lived…on the edge I guess you would say. Or I guess they would say. They have no idea what the edge really is, but there, they would say that man who deals narcotic substances to the ghetto warriors was a man who lived on the edge. This man that I unfortunately loved made a transgression upon another man, a much fouler man. This man is the Beast in my past, everyone has a Beast in their past somewhere that ripped them into what they’ve become and this man was my Beast, and he slaughtered my love and chained me and shot me full of junk until I couldn’t live without it and then made me fuck strangers in exchange for fixes. Funny isn’t it. How the Beast becomes the thing we need”. She takes a long drag on her cigarette.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“Didn’t you get my note?” she asks, exhaling smoke from her nose.
“Oh yeah, I guess I did” I say. “But I’m very forgetful these days.”
“Well, I killed him” she says. “Anyway, someway I ended up here, on society orders, told to watch you and make sure you didn’t act up.”
I jump back against the wall and edge for the door. My hands out and ready to grab the knob.
“You work for the society! You’re here to kill me!” I grab a nearby lamp and I smash it on the wall. A shank of ceramic remains.
“At first I did, but then who are you to judge me about that. I changed my mind on all of that as soon as I met the Great Leader. He has changed many minds on the issue.”
I breathe a bit. “I saw the Great Leader” I say. “With Jackie, the girl I lost my virginity to.”
Lucy smiles a bit and taps her ash onto the bedspread. “That’s sweet. Too bad she’s stuck here too, though.”

My report to the society (seventh grade):

          And this is how I’ve been feeling. I got to say that it’s been a little downer of a week and I feel kind of like I’m fighting for survival. You see I feel like either I’m changing or the world is changing around me, getting more violent, more merciless.
         A couple of minutes ago I saw a pornographic film from the nineteen seventies, Erotic City. The first shot a darkly nostalgic skyscape of what looks like Chicago, or something like it. Next we see our main character making something like an important business call from an ECU, till the camera pulls out and he dives down, face first between the legs of his blond secretary. The plot of this pitifully driven hardcore gem of the seventies is set in a sexually uninhibited and promiscuous world, though it seems that in Erotic City we have lost quite a bit of human contact more than skin to skin, or deeper, whatever. Up and down all around the contact can go anyway, but you kind of lose something in that society, and I believe that is the reason for the stoicism of all of the characters in the film. One line that rings clear in my memory comes from the lips of Laurie Smith as Jamie Gillis pounds her from behind and it goes “I hate you so much, but I love the way you fuck.” The film is not so much sexy as it is a dark homage to Brave New World.

Sincerely Homes Jinn

Dear Homes Jinn,
         Your hormones seem to be in working order. You have been a loyal agent for three years now. Would you like us to send you a beautiful virgin? We have plenty.

Sincerely
The Eco Cull Eegerr society.

         Dear brothers of the society
                   Thank you very much for the offer but no thank you, not now. I feel this would cause imbalance to my sexual development. I must find a girl with which to exchange virginities on my own. I am sure that I will find her when the time is right.

Sincerely,
Your loyal agent, Homes Jinn

         

Dear Homes Jinn,
                    We may call for to seduce someone at some point. Don’t wait around in the cherry club for too long.

Sincerely
The Eco Cull Eegerr society.

         “They told me the secret of who Seneca is” I say to Lucy with vengeance in my eyes. “That’s why I’m with you. That’s why I will join you and the Great Leader and I will help you kill them.”
She nods her head, very gravely. “Good”. She hits the cigarette then pauses. She taps the ash. “Very good” she says. “But first, unfortunately, Ray Gin has to die.”

The one with the brown hair bends down and looks into my glossy eyes. “Wake up, you little bitch” he says.