Artwork by EE Rankin.

Out on Bail and Drunk and on the Run in Minnesota 

or 

In Furtherance of Avoiding Capture by Trooper Cocksuck and his Band of Free Radicals 

***** 

No trigger warning: it’s all vanilla pie from here on out 

***** 

Out on bail. I was as free as a fox in the meadow. The judge had restricted me to the four-corners of the state. That was fine. It left me with thousands of miles of drink to get a start on. I met with a shrink per the instructions of my lawyer. It went much like you might imagine – she concluded that I suffered from a late onset of psychopathy and mania attended by auditory hallucinations. She administered the EPES and noted that results on the Masochism, Sadism, Fetishism, Exhibitionism, and Autogynephilia scales were unremarkable, though scores were high on the Transvestism scale. I thanked her kindly – she was spot on. Then I restocked on pistols and rifles at a gun show in a northern suburb that was home to the 1988 All-State Cum Guzzlers, and with a briefcase of cash, the guns and ammo, and a trunk filled with gin and wine, I returned to the basement of my domiciliary in the hopes of finding god. Not finding him, I settled on his ginger-haired half-brother, that little cocksucker who brags about being related to the almighty and who never lets you forget his family roots way up where the lightning comes from, god damn that fucker, he’s always showing up on shoulders and pushing shit on people, hustling on the corner like The Buyer in one of Burroughs’ wares, or just whispering little poems into the ear of the Impossible Menken, who operates a linguistic skid-loader inside the tip of my pen(is) while I blast gin into my throat and listen to Verdi and take a Bayer every day and Cialis per script and sit next to my light box and I am taking fistfuls of the low t pills to counteract the gin and it’s a balancing act, really it is, the gin and the low t pills and the occasional gummy vitamin but it is really all about the gin and the driving, I am the poet laureate of drunk-driving and I have enough Cialis in my system to shoot off an erection lasting longer than four lifetimes, call a doctor on that one why don’t you, they never warned about an erection reincarnating for four generations of red-blooded male lineage but it happened, it’s me, and I’m only suppressing it with gin and fantasies and drunk-driving in the dead of day. But for now I’m holed up in the basement, have been for weeks. Perhaps I’ll venture out. I haven’t spoken with any of my sons in months. I haven’t spoken with my lawyer in as long. The only contact I have had is with the occasional cockroach solicitor at the Ass-to-Mouth Heating and Air Company, or perhaps it was James Buchanan the Punctual Plumber, and he keeps knocking and peeking in windows and one night he came in and we had tea with gin in our birthday suits and he humored me with manly charm and we made an internet video called “Two Dicks Touching” that went viral, and he snuck into my closet to sniff my topcoat, or perhaps that was a dream. In any event, I have been living a life of solitude and shame, immense shame, which only hurls me further into the depths. I wonder, at times, how a change of scenery would treat my constitution. I wonder, also, what is out there. Do you know? I am out on unconditional bail, which means that so long as I show my face in court, I am free to continue my basement escapades without the random testing for alcohol and drugs that would otherwise be imposed on me. The gin bottles – those unbroken – are lined against the wall per habit. Pizza boxes, Chinese food containers, another trapped and now dead raccoon dappled with burns from cigar butts, I have made him the nabob of the place: a shrine composed of candles, incense and lustral water surrounds him in the northeast corner. Maggots have moved into him/her – I didn’t check for parts. My phone calls to my sons go unanswered. They have all de-friended me on the facebook and they knew better than to accept the offer of friendship from my false account under a fictitious name with a headshot stolen from a bing search. They are aligned against me on account of that nasty newspaper. Oh the howling press! What say they of the presumption of innocence? The presumption of innocence is a fiddlestick wrapped up in slime algae. Nobody believes in it and especially not me – I know what I did. What it did. I/me/he/him/who/whom, me, it was me, Goddard (my name), the Jag spirit of the night, the pluck of perverts, I am like that little shit in The Room, only authentic, that’s me, nobody can be certain they will not commit a crime, life is like a box of cocksuckers, and then you die, there’s no denying it, unless you own a bunch of restaurants and live in the Hills of LA, but even then, your swan still picks up a virus and you have to bring the cocksucker to a million dollar vet., and then you die too, alone. Every last person dies alone. My days are tormented by hours, my hours tormented by minutes, tick-tock the clock revolves and spits in my face as the fat on my body and the wrinkles on my face and hands redouble. I am aware of the end. I am intently seeking death and yet doing everything within my power to stay the black hand of the reaper. I am the reaper. I control the lives of strangers beyond my door: they are captured in the crosshairs of my rifle as the muzzle taps at the pane of the basement window and points at the joggers outside with resolve. I could knock off a brain with a four-pound pull. Bang! And if I did it I’d be presumed innocent all over again, only with another body gone from the earth, and the law would have no choice but than to presume I didn’t do it! Ha! What a clever trick of the justice system to force everyone into some fictional accounting of crime, to lay it on thick with bullshit and reminders of the importance of one’s day in court, the same kind of shit my lawyer was talking about in his walnut belt and matching walnut shoes and Valentino tie and his fucking handshakes all over the courthouse and the way he cleared his throat in the elevator before he met the cameras and I wish I had taken him out with a scattergun and maybe I still will and I’m damn sure there’ll be another Esq. devil to take his place and spew the same shit from his mouth like the last gasps leaving the curdled neck of a ruptured duck. I am falling into the depths, I wish someone would kill me with a slide trombone or something else musical and sweet, I cannot go on but I know I must because I’m too much the patsy to put the barrel in my mouth, it would just rest there for days on end like that little shit in Waiting Period, only again, much more authentic, because this time it’s me, the real deal, a real deal death blow where the hammer falls, the primer ignites and the projectile is sent screaming down the barrel and into my head, I am in the highest demographic (white men over 60 and under 85), 29 for every 100,000 of us, and that’s not a small number according to most but an incredibly small number according to me, the dear, dear confidante of the human experience and the one person on earth who understands it all, take it from me, I have spent these decades studying the reasons for living and the contrary, I am an expert, like that Hans in Frankfurt who makes sausages, the people come from far and wide to listen to his nonsense and bunk, his notions on nosey neighbors and his fuck-a-duck antics, that fucking Hans, he thought he could take a boat to our shore and be greeted by Tom Styles (the pharisaic crowd man), but all he got was a knee to the groin and ten thousand letters from 0% auto financing companies, 20,000 e-mails up his ass from Quicken Loans and one million letters from that punctual plumbing cocksucker and his eardrums exploded at Ellis Island when the speakers shot out with advertisements from I Need More Hair dot com, and Hans went crazy and picked up a pill habit from our wonderful pharma-pushers and started masturbating to our Cali. porn and killed his wife and then his nosey neighbors and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and broke his head on the hull of some rich bastard’s boat right at the moment when all on board were having coffee and cakes. Hans fell like a Chinese ace. Hans was cheated. Everyone is cheated. The only thing that isn’t cheated is death. Hans knew it.

The rear window of the Jag is defrosting/deicing. The month is March/march, capital/lowercase. I am driving West/west and north, again with the letters. My mcmansion is locked up, shuttered. I am beyond the city and the hellish burbs. It is open country and the road is a two-lane highway designated scenic by the Minnesota Department of Transvestites. The speed limit is 60 so the cruise is at 61 – every trooper gives a buffer of at least plus-three. I have seen no fewer than six state troopers in the first fifty miles out of city. The troopers are all on the march in search of country gas hounds and gay deceivers. Verdi is finally getting some play on Classical Minnesota Public Radio, as it is his 200th birthday, may the light of the earth hail glory on him. Normally the boobs play Haydn, Sibelius and Felix M. on endless repeat (every once in a while they bait the casual listener by throwing in Beethoven’s 5th). The first town I stop in is host to one of your traditional yokel taverns, The Rusty Hammer, The Happy Lodge, The Dirty Cocksucker from Scandinoovia, I forget the name. It was 2 in the afternoon and the place was empty. I chose after the bar to pick the tender’s brain on area motels. There being only one, and that full of bedbugs (so he disclosed), I scattered out to make hay while the sun still shined, which is to say, I hopped into the Jag at a 0.17 BAC and blew outta dodge. Fat zombies in zubaz and pro-sports regalia came out from the woodwork and shot meth grenades from potato guns as I flew through the school zone and gave the finger to every poor innocent that has never had a chance in that backward village lost in the blink. Over the next sixty miles I polish off seven beers and pass every car on the road for the sport of it. I see three more state troopers – they are made insecure by a secret hate and fear of their natural protectors, like ferroelectrics they vanish and appear and feed on high beams. The global positioning system places me in the thick of the state: there is no turning back. When the sun has gone entirely, I jack off in the driver’s seat to Verdi’s anvil chorus on compact disc. I pull into a rest stop and shave everything like I had done once in my 30’s: eyebrows, head, arms, armpits, legs, chest, ass, balls, I am a waxy mongrel, the indelible marks of Goddard, the saint. I stop for the night in a town called Octavia. It boasts a tax-free business environment to lure in poor cocksuckers from near and far. It has lured me, somehow I feel it, like the undeniable truth that man cultivates war for war’s sake, it runs through me, Octavia is it. I will die here or die trying. I find a bar, one of three or four, it is called the Gang Shay, and there are fish on the wall all smiling and stiff. The place is packed and I can tell immediately that the mental habits of the patrons is probably best reflected by a stack of failed lottery tickets and vague and misguided notions of the American Revolution. When I enter, there is an immediate bounty on me, the first one to give a five of clubs to the eyebrowless man – it’s a classic tale of local lore. The woman bartender is young, nice, fat as a sow, and she asks what kind of gin and I ask for Hayman’s and she says all she has is Seagram’s and I tell her I’m inclined and she says what and I say that’s fine and she asks what I want it with and I say just gin and she can’t believe I don’t want it with Sprite but I am firm in my resolve to keep Sprite out of my gin and to meet her in the middle I tell her to throw a straw in it but not a lime wedge unless you cut it fresh in front of me and she rolls her eyes but I give her a 20-spot and she is on Team Goddard for the rest of the night and she gives me some fries from france on the house and asks how longs I’ve been sick and I am confused but then remember the eyebrows are gone and I tell her they gave me one million more years to live and she thinks it’s a joke but I tell her that I cannot die and I pound my fist and go into pure flapdoodle respecting the trammels of tradition and a guy in camouflage steps up to fix me but the bartender steps in and later I see them talking sotto voce and glancing in my direction and I assume she is telling him I have a bunch of cash and he’ll be waiting for me on the other side of the oak, but since I have such a keen sense for that split-second glance I caught from him, it really will be me waiting for him, there is a .38 in my pocket and I am so murderous and contrite that I almost feel bad for him and his confederates should they conspire and execute some plan of action outside under the lights of heaven against the bald drunk with the red nose (me). I went to the payphone and took out the card with my lawyer’s number. Then I called the number. Then I fired that cuntface. All he ever did was ask for money. I gambol back to my stool, where I resume my seat and order another gin from the female accomplice/bartender and she gives me a giant pour from the bottle of Seagram’s like we’re pals, and we are for the nonce, but I know it’s a part of the plan and I know I’m swimming like a fucking goldfish in a bowl and the eyes of the camouflage posse are on me like glue and they think they’re on the brink of a great score and they can’t even taste the death that awaits them if they so much as nod hello, and I drink down the gin like it’s water and order another and soon the bottle is gone and there’s none in reserve and one of the camouflage cocksuckers bellies up next to me and even has the balls to wink at the bartender within my line of sight and asks if he can buy me one because he “know[s] this place” and I ask him to consider the scene where the piano chair is pushed under the piano so that it is clear that nobody is playing and he says I don’t get it and I tell him I know and he realizes in that instant that he has caught my blood disease, I have locked on to him, there is no scraping the Goddard crabs from his taint, they are there, clenching to the flesh like pincer-demons in the bright of day, he has no chance against what he assumed was an easy mark but who turned out to be the devil incarnate as I lick my lips and breath heavily through my nose like a bull and I tell him I’m responsible for the death of sixteen homeless from here to Cheyenne and slap my arm, which is covered in sleeve, and disclose that I have carved a notch in the flesh to remember each one and it is only then that I tell him okay he can buy me a drink, make it a gin gimlet, and horrified, he slinks away, like the way of all flesh, rationale, self-preserving, reasonable and with piss in his pants, and I see his group hustle for their bill and rush out of the place and the bartender thinks I have the powers of a genie and wonders what I’m doing later and says that guy you just scared off is a bad motherfucker and I say yeah baby, I knew that, and we end up making it at her place, only I don’t dare go in, I fuck her in the Jag on her driveway to Franchomme’s Caprice No. 9 and take off into the night sky ex parte after stealing her underwear and cutting off a lock of her hair at gunpoint. I speed into the black pocket of straight shots and curves and painted fog lines, and suddenly they are on to me, those red-ass troopers in the broad brims and accommodation collars who weave in and out of hell and hunt acid freaks with flamethrowers and rape bachelor mothers in small meth hamlets and who look for horizontal gaze nystagmus clues in the blue eyes of champagne tricks gone mad. Like gestapo radicals they hunt jodies and maricons and hard-road freaks; there is no allaying their madness with kind shrugs and smiles, it is with joy and lust that they break down massage parlor doors and kill off speadfreaks and spread beaver among themselves. I am gone from Octavia. All of the troopers have converged there to investigate the complaint by the woman whose hair I robbed in a state of PCD. I am ahead on the road by a good hour, but the troopers have laid rubber in the meantime and I can sense them on my tail, like a wolf does the hounds. The troopers are on me. I see the burned villages in my rear-view mirror, there is smoke rising – like schizo-maniacs the troopers lure in plastic hippies for graft money and spend it on ammo, sex and keg beer, they have chewed and swallowed the insane root and their eyes show it, they will kill me on sight, it’s in their blood, they’ve gone apeshit over my Jag and the prospect of forfeiting it to themselves under the color of law, like a maddened swarm they have made mortal oaths to catch and hang me by the ass, and they are everywhere, everywhere, they pop headfirst from the very trunks of trees with lights flashing and every headlight carries their devil spirit, every siren their lethal vision, they don’t care a damn about friendly fire and fragging, so long as their bullets catch me, that’s all they want, that’s all they’ve ever wanted. There was a story in the press how one of them was wronged during a traffic stop, the trooper’s honor was challenged by some smartass teenage punk who was parked at a lookout and playing smacky lips with his sweetheart and all the troopers across the state converged on scene and the scamp had his heart cut out in front of his face and the troopers sent it off to the Minnesota Department of Solar Energy and Sheep Fucking, Bureau of Sister Acts and Secrets where the heart was preserved on ice and later donated to the Office of the Governor by transplant, and the girl was sent off as a prostie to a northern county where the trooper’s made their rounds on paid leave, those damnable sworn public officers of the roads, they play by a different set, waiting the hours out on interstate bridges and sending out photographs by text among themselves of the various drivers and passengers they’ve skin-searched roadside and they brag of their abominations and cover-ups, like the time one of them shot a skinny-dipper, the time another stole a babysitter, and the now proven instance where one trooper wigged out during a skull session on impaired drivers and inhaled air dusters and methadine and unknown liquid gases for a week and went out to the South Dakota border and wrapped his squad around a tree with his face done up like a Sioux warrior and they found 40+ used air dusters between the front and back seats and a typed manifesto/confession relating all manner of crimes against the homeless and the jurisprudential reasoning in support of them ex officio, and the final paragraph was titled “last bill and testament” and followed by a passage out of Poor Richard’s Almanack about leaving one’s wealth in a madman’s hands. The trooper ended up living through it all. After a residential treatment program and a probationary period that included random searches of his home for dusters, he was back on the roads in an all-new squad. Nobody comes through life like state troopers, like that rawboned warrior brother-in-law to Mrs. Q., the arch conspirator, he was POST-certified at a school in a revolutionary compound and could take the heads off drunks with blasting powder from six miles off, nobody could stop him, like a protein gelatin he came oozing out of side mirrors with preliminary breath testing instruments that he shoved into the mouths of soccer moms, like a bolt-goblin he appeared at drivers’ side windows and flashed lights and went on high speed chases that led to the very bottom of Hades, where the troopers play cards on Wednesdays on the tortured hides of drunk sponges who have all crossed the fog lines on county highways one through one billion. And then there was Trooper Cottonmouth, the most notorious of slayers and the only trooper positively confirmed by scientists at the University of Bushwack, Duluth Campus, to suffer under full blown dissociative disorder, he was birthed subterranean in the black waters at Calcutta and is known throughout all the judicial districts for his trademark of smoking bath salts and raiding greyhound buses for virgins with his gun drawn, occasionally he’d fill some poor objecting mother and father with lead as they wailed against the kidnapping but that never stopped him, sixteen jury trials could not stop him and with the legal significance of his acquittals combined with the backing by gangster union reps. and lawyers touting and shouting the presumption of innocence, he was on the force to stay, he was even promoted to Captain of the Guards in the Service of Venus during the time of this very writing, and even while he holds that esteemed office he continues to slip muscle relaxers to crossing guards in bright vests who are later found in his trunk in the vests only and he’s heralded as the finest of the brass over poker hands in Hades, where the bodies are disposed of over mighty cheers and peach schnapps and the cocksuckers even gobble down black-market absinthe from Europe, not that thujone-free shit they’re selling stateside now with Uncle Sam’s blessing, the real shit, the buzz shit, their adaptation of texas hold ‘em poker dictates that every time there is an ace-high straight the lucky holder of the hand is rendered invincible by the hands of the di inferi, who dip the favored trooper in a vat of dextromethorphan and he is then sent out on the sacred mission of venturing to the surface of the earth to capture an exact score of expectant women and return them to the underworld, where the women are never heard from again but it is suspected that the unborn young are birthed premie and incubated in gun holsters under hot lamps and are given vitamins and DMT intravenously and eventually are raised into young troopers themselves, like H. Youth they learn to march and defy logic and reason and eventually are masters of administering the nine-step-walk-and-turn test and taught the art of the cover-up and how to plant a trace amount of cocaine in a center console and how to gun down an innocent man or woman in the back to make it look like the front and then and only then are they badged and holstered and sent off into the human race to raise Cain. There is a division amidst the troopers: a minority of their number have formed a cabal around the suspicion that a Trooper Blacklegs is cheating at cards, that he hides an ace in his sleeve because of an addiction to dextro and everyone knows it is the same Trooper Blacklegs who robo-tripped for eight days and dressed his cock up to resemble Bruce Vilanch at an x-mas party thrown by the American Federation of Storm Troopers and Satanic Corinthians, the same Trooper Blacklegs who sent a package-bomb by U.S. post to the Metropolitan Toastmasters Club and poisoned a city lake with LSD, that cocksucker, the fish all went belly-up and the swimmers ran to shore crying and laughing and waving their dicks and tits due north, where the trooper was standing and snapping pictures. Trooper Cottonmouth is not a part of the cabal of conspirators, oh no, it was Trooper Cottonmouth who convinced Trooper Blacklegs into a bunny fuck when the two were staking out a warehouse known to deal in sex dolls with faux hymens in a statewide crackdown on dirty old men, and there was the time when the Commandant discovered the two troopers naked and oiled and wrapped up like two snakes in the position of soixante-neuf in the locked trunk of a squad. The two troopers are thick as thieves and always riding around together high as kites on dextro, bath salts and keg beer. Trooper Cottonmouth’s squad is fitted with a beer tap in the center console and a tube on a lanyard dispenses LSD through the barrel of his shotgun, which sits upright center-cabin. There is no stopping them when they are together, whole towns have been set ablaze and anyone with a 0.00001 BAC within a 900-mile radius of their squad is liable to be hanged about the neck and tortured in manacles, they are given to month-long fits of rage and fury, the only thing that assuages their bloodlust is the occasional driver who performs perfectly the one-legged stand test and recites the alphabet backward without singing, a renegade hymn of 26 symbols mastered by troopers and the especial chant of Troopers Cottonmouth and Blacklegs, for days on end they drive around the state caroling the alphabet back to front, bombed out on meth synthesized by locals who get passes on drunk-driving because they supply the troopers with analeptics and first-born sons. It is Troopers Cottonmouth and Blacklegs that are pursuing me, I can feel it, the wall cloud of acid rain that spreads out from their squad is gaining on the horizon, and I press the pedal of the Jag and top it out in frantic search of refuge. They can smell me and I can smell them. As much as a trooper’s antennae are up and out and ready to finger the air for scents of alcohol and sex crimes, so too are the drunk’s: like a rogue whale the good drunk uses echolocation to search out radar and duty belts by sound waves and a secondary process of maneuvers and reconnaissance subject to trade secret in the vaults of Goddard, Inc., a parent company to several subsidiaries, each of them operating under assumed names to champion the 21st Amendment and lobby against legislatures that are ever criminalizing the classic drunk and his fundamental right to drive. It is the Goddard corporation that is lobbying for the disbursement of federal grant money to the states on condition that they raise the legal limit to 0.16, an effort that riles the troopers and causes them to see red, I know it, they have been working on a transmutation machine in the deepest valley in Hades that will permit troopers to mutate into various forms of plant life and minerals and they’re on the verge of animal mutation, which Trooper Cottonmouth is very pleased about, it being his dream to mutate into a ten-horn buck and jump through the windshield of a drunk driver and antler the person to death, his idea singly, he was wowed by the machine’s ability to transform Trooper Cocksuck into a bundle of dynamite and blasting caps, as such, Trooper Cocksuck lied in wait on a roadside shoulder and detonated on a weaving minivan. The blast carried the van into the ditch, where the flames overtook it. As for the trooper, he was gone too. They collected his ashes and analyzed them at the Minnesota Bureau of Farm Statistics and Super-Heroin by a process of ion-mobility spectrometry that revealed deep-set depravities and addictions to human growth hormones and weight loss pills that cause suicide. A study is underway at the same bureau to determine whether the negative externalities of the transmutation machine will be worth its many benefits: a concern was raised at the legislature that a machine allowing men to transform themselves into dynamite will have the effect of wiping out the general population of males in the instance they follow Cocksuck’s lead and blast themselves into oblivion.

I have beat them. For now. The Jag is under a tree in the back of the hotel and I am eating a bag of deer jerky on a bed stripped of its comforter in a Super 8. Half a Subway sandwich is in the minifridge, along with a six-pack of Bud and a fifth of whiskey and a gallon of gin – sluicing the worries. On top of the fridge are two bottles of cheap red wine: one of the labels depicts a skull, the other a rooster. I am dandling the lock of hair from Octavia, which village is now hundreds of miles distant. I do not know the name of the current town though I do know that it ends in a vowel and that it had a mayor who was arrested for drinking gasoline and hiding cameras in high school locker rooms. I learned the same from the good-natured boy at the hotel desk. He was glad for the stranger in the horse-hair wig and rouge – no doubt his self esteem was often made to suffer in that small community. We had a date in my motel room at 10-sharp, where and when we watched television together on the bed. He admitted he was the only gay in town – his down hours were spent drinking and reading Rimbaud under a slut-lamp with scag jones. He had a voice like a man I’d seen on the youtube named Steve Oh. I plundered his throat with my cock to try and drop him from a soprano (queer) to a tenor (survival). We drank gin-and-water and he went off to score meth and I am awaiting his return, yes, as I write this. Later yet. He never came back. Morning. Packing up. The clerk never showed. My eyes contain a yellow-earth pigment resonant with cirrhosis and gallstones. The jerky-gin-shit I am leaving in the nightstand is a crime tantamount to murder. I left a note for the clerk thanking him for the night. Someone should cut off my head. No more than one night in one place. Have to move on. The troopers are on me like flies on shit and I am informed by the madman’s extrasensory perception that Troopers Cottonmouth and Blacklegs are checking the motel registries and leaving their autographs in squid ink on the backsides of maids. They even took over a motel in the charming city of Lunesk, like bedlamites the troopers from the immediate and surrounding counties focalized on the place and set up shop: the motel was divided between whoring and dope-dealing and the main office was converted into a war chest to defend the place. Eight-by-ten photographs of Trooper Cottonmouth and Trooper Blacklegs were installed in the main office like the pres. and v.p. in any military or civilian installation of government. The cabal against Trooper Blacklegs was killed off by a swarm of flesh-eating locusts controlled by the darker side of Trooper Cottonmouth’s split personality. The troopers left over to run the motel committed vile sex acts in the direction of the framed photographs five times a day while singing the synth-pop version of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in baritone as a pledge of their allegiance to the new divines. When the bath salt and dextro supplies were out, the troopers abandoned their motel and returned to Hades. That is, except for Troopers Cottonmouth and Blacklegs, they pursue me yet, they each of them have a blasting cap around their neck on a chain to remember Trooper Cocksuck by and they have made it their life’s work to catch and torture me, I am the ewe-lamb, the sought after goose, they have the green light to run me through, the governor of the state has put a bounty on my head and asked all the public to go to dinner and pray for my capture over meatloaf and potatoes, my governor, my sovereign! all infra dig., he even held a public mass in the Village of Grapeshot with the Archbishop of Antifreeze and his bosom buddies to reinforce the public sentiment against me, they have conspired to hunt and kill me and have multiplied the bounty by tens and the troopers are fucking vicious and greedy and eager to make a claim on the bounty, at present the reward could supply Hades with enough bath salts and dextro to last an eternity and they know it, they are pursuing me like a holy grail with death pledges, like burnt out dope fiends they rough-ride over corpses and spit vapors of hate in the direction of fresh graves. The Archbishop himself has broken from the papacy and written a fresh bull on the year of the Jubilee and he declared a holy war against me that spans from christmas to christmas and he even kissed the toe of Trooper Cottonmouth and ordered all subordinates within the realm of the bishopric to certify themselves as breath-test operators, to play the sedulous ape the whole church has joined the troopers and sworn oaths to uphold the constitution and once the minced oaths were made the troopers got the bishops hooked on bath salts and dextro and a synthetic crystal called flakka the troopers are trafficking in from China and the bishops go fucking crazy for it since it shoots their vitals through the ceiling and gives them super-human strength, enough strength to think they can survive in Hades, but that place is reserved for troopers only, poor Bishop Jacklip, he tried to make it in Hades but didn’t even survive three hours before members of the Hades Association for the Celebration of the Memory of Trooper Cocksuck formed a mob and cut his dick off and left him to bleed out and stole his mitre and ran the dick and the hat up a flagpole to the cheers of the crowd, but that was before the 201- Trooper-Bishop Alliance, and to make amends for the murdered bishop, the troopers supplied the Archbishop with a ten-ton delivery of bath salts as bloodwit restitution and from that day hence the troopers and bishops have hunted me unreservedly and without dissent among their ranks, they fill churches and prisons from here to Timbuktu and they have made “Puttin’ on the Ritz” their anthem in memory of the time they took over the motel, it is like their Alamo, the wanton brutes, like fire ants they seek and destroy but unlike fire ants they smoke meth and rape and pillage for sport. Every trooper and bishop indoctrinated after the alliance of 201- has an armband with an image of Taco Ockerse and Trooper Cocksuck fucking in the position of reverse-jackhammer and they are both smiling out from the patch and it is usually the last smiles any member of the public sees before trooper so-and-so fills them with buckshot for driving over the legal limit, the troopers are trained killers, it is with comfort and glee that they send drunks to the astral spirits, no doubt about it, the troopers are twice as savage since they allied with the bishops to find and kill me, there are bouts in Hades per mensem where the troopers and bishops meet to strike Dutch bargains on policies and best practices, a giant coliseum was erected without public notice and comment in the nameless capitol where the blood-soaked death matches unfurl. To arrive at the coliseum one must trek over one league of open fields where atheists are shot in foxholes by city clerks and friends of the court – this measure was deemed necessary by the government in Hades, which consists of a single Commandant of the Troopers who smokes bath salts and beats off to negligent indecency. His bi-weekly column Smut and Nothing Butt is mandatory reading and the laws require that it be posted above and below every restroom sign directing employees to wash hands. On his first visit the Archbishop commented favorably on the dead atheists in holes. The coliseum itself is a spectacle, magnificent really: architects stolen from the finest cities on earth were sequestered for months on its design and then given the perquisite of being the first gladiators to kill each other off to the fanfare of bebadged spectators. The Commandant has a box-seat, where he sits baron and feme. The Archbishop of Antifreeze has also a box, where he disports among his male-harem. The gladiators consist exclusively of those unfortunate souls who drop out of Trooper School and are fed to each other. They are given forced flakka-injections and put into monstrous drag before the bouts. With no weapons dispensed or allowed, many of the contenders resort to taking off their glazed pumps and beating each other to death with them. The last-living among them is given a three-dollar bill, thanked for his time and is swiftly drowned in a pit of molasses and vinegar. These feats being seen through, it is customary for the Commandant and the Archbishop to play tennis in private over iced tea. 

I am in the town of New Oslo, mid-state and to the west. I have a BAC of 1.1 – a number that should cause death according to the Minnesota Association of Incurable Transplant-Seekers. My rearview mirror is a veritable Vulcan’s: it shows past, present and future, though the future is faint and bleary. Bags of mystery are in the trunk – I do not remember committing a murder or murders but it smells like I may have. They will never catch me. They will have to hold court as a maiden assize. God spreads his light and shines down upon me and is gracious unto me, he has struck a balance, all of the world’s sins are imputed to me since Jesus was forced into retirement on account of an addiction to flakka and several warrants went out for his arrest by the department of homeland security when he attempted to import a ship of women from the eastern bloc, there was even a photograph of Jesus on a long dock breaking a bottle of champagne on the hull of the ship before its voyage and long before his hopes were dashed at American customs. Like him I take in sin and hate and loathing and lock it into my chest and while I may never hang on a cross I have absolutely no problem with the prospect of putting other people on them and asking them to suffer for my sins, hell, we could let the sins of the world transmigrate from soul to soul indefinitely and nobody would be on the hook to the old waxy King of the Courts, the grandfatherly autolatrist peering over the cumulous, the same god who drowned the whole earth, who committed genocide after genocide for thrill, who ordered a concubine raped and dismembered, who threatened forced cannibalism and caused certain birds to be protected by superstitions, but what do you expect when the bible was written by men about men who kill men and rape men and eat men and drown men and dismember concubines and lie, cheat, steal, eat ribs and belch and vomit and fart when saints aren’t looking, it’s the same kind of violence that keeps the troopers and bishops singing and dancing and transmigrating souls among themselves, they very nearly brought back the soul of Trooper Cocksuck, but the machine malfunctioned, heads rolled, and the soul of Trooper Cocksuck was atomized for all time.

The town of New Oslo is nothing like the old Oslo. The old Oslo has buildings just high enough for suicide, like Bergen. The highest structure in New Olso is the motel I am staying in: one story with a metal roof that drums under the cold rain. My eyebrows are showing indicia of growth, as is the rest of my face. My genitals have already erupted in hair on account of the low t pills and gummy vitamins. Somehow the growth activity has oriented around the pubis. I might write to the president of the company and the president of these united states to advise accordingly. A roadmap of Minnesota is spread out on the table. The four corners are held down by mugs holding hot gin and lemon wedges. I ran the gin through the instant coffee maker to heat it – a trick of the old pro. There are wondrous town names: Ada, Climax, Nimrod, Savage. Others yet named by drunk pigs and queer fish in a territory once unknown to eyes pocketed in white flesh. The bloodshot eyes of their progeny have multiplied like rabbits and raped the territory and named sports teams to remember the Indians by but have otherwise left them standing on corners with their spots knocked off. I take a sip of the gin. Life. The television is on in the background. A show on the home box office network depicts a man buried up to his head in sand and another man slamming a shovel onto the first man’s head. The man with the shovel has wonderful hair and an evil mien made for the big screen. The phone rings in the room adjoining mine. I kill the television and press my ear to the wall but can’t make out any of the muted words. I turn the tube back on and it shows a bunch of old cars driving down a rutted road near a beach. I turn it off again. Then I slam the gin drinks, north, south, east and west. I squeeze the lemons into my eyes then run lipstick across my lips without the aid of a mirror. I am crying on account of the acid-juice and I find the bottle of gin and put it to my lips. The acid in the eyes cuts the burn in the throat. After a long hit of the gin I see the red paint on the rim of the bottle. Empty, I fling it at the wall where the soft-pedal human voices dwell. I kill the lights in the room and place a chair by the window, where I peel back a corner of the curtain ever so slight as to give me view of the world while leaving me virtually undetectable behind the cold glass. Nothing happens. I sit for minutes, hours. I make trips to my bottles and back. When the sun has gone I sneak to the Jag and pop the trunk. The odor is corrupting even to my old nose. I cut open the bag and discover someone else’s trash: decomposing food, paper plates, diapers, beer bottles, other uncognizable refuse of the stranger(s) from nowhere. I hurl the bags into the bed of a large truck and thank stars I did not kill someone. I then return to the motel room and place precisely one bottle of gin into my abdominal organs. That is the last I remember of the day/night/earth orbit into shattered continuum. Hell is but a blaze. A week later. The troopers have eaten their broccoli and lifted their weights. Their central nervous systems are charged with the hate of the worst diehards. Their leaders, along with the blessing of the church, have set up a dictatorship of their own, superior to the legislature of the state, which, while necessary to the preservation of their “revolution,” is a practical negation of their dream of a utopian world. Thus, you see whole plastic surgery camps devoted to churning out troopers in the likeness of Taco Ockerse, complete with veneers, a tailcoat from the Ritz song and penchants for dick pics in the pastiche of new literature according to Claude Mauriac, the latter being influenced by his bosom buddy, M.F., who we leave to the devourment of the audience, with a nota bene against cardio-fucks, depending on the season, one or the other or six to one half dozen, beautiful, just for you, like the leather-bound edition of The Complete Works of Saki as translated by Trooper Cocksuck from the English to the language of dispatch logs, that motherfucker, Trooper Cocksuck is all I can dream about in my little Jag boudoir, he eats at me, calls me from hell and reminds me of recalled beef, Troopers Cottonmouth and Blacklegs have their little bejeweled blasting caps to remember him by but I have an amulet vial holding his ashes, I stole it from the Minnesota Bureau of Genocidal DILFS, and it has inured to my benefit like the holy ghost does the preacher, everyone fills up the plate, a multitude, a throng, they are all against me, those troopers in their broad brims and pressed seams and all those church devils who joined forces with them, screaming from the pulpits and holding up superimposed polaroids of me cutting off the heads of snakes near the bend of some shoreline, their congregations are easily bent against what some call evil and I’m not saying I’m not only that those sons of bitches don’t have to go around contriving mock-ups with my mug attached, their people go nuts, they’re malleable, good crowd people who try to make it to at least 100 baseball games a summer, none of them know what it is to eat one’s heart out in solitude, they must press on en masse to the next beat, every single time the bald eagle shits, they’ll smile at you and shake your hand and then you turn your back and they devour you like a sex-skin with a poker face. 

It’s that time of year, to coin a phrase. All of the troopers out of the Bemidji office fly into ego-death-trip in adult diapers in the wooded areas and shit their pants and throw babies against walls in random homesteads and surrender their passports to customs agents in glazed pumps who look nasty and stuff. It all started in ’09 when Trooper Cocksuck’s protege, a Trooper Kazinski with the nom de plume of “Afghan Tim” (no questions, please, I mean it, says he), was dating a blonde hard body – three dates and he meant to bed her on the fourth but she found his penis pump in a closet and assumed a small dick – in fact, Trooper Kazinski was hung like a jackal – but it didn’t matter – she made the finger and thumb gesture indicating a small endow and he shot her in the face with his service weapon, went into total ego-death trip, woke up and threw someone’s baby against a wall and ended up doing 23 years less good time in his head only, the son of a bitch, he walked out of the courtroom acquitted after only 15 minutes of juror deliberation (later learned the jury read the first half of the jury instructions and then watched the foreman jack off on His Honor’s signature). But enough on that. More on that later. Let’s talk about me. 

I am bogged down in the motel, have been for weeks, drenched in self-loathing and gut rot, bulging, wishing for death, psychedelics have turned me “je suis gay” according to the Gideon, there is more gin in me than all of Tanqueray, someone really should cut off my head, someone must, the low t pills are out but my stash of Cialis is strong and I’ve raided the mayor’s home and stolen a box full of pills with long names and a champagne-colored dildo device and a painting of a tumbril and a fleshlight-vagina fuck pocket in the color of mixed race and I’m thinking of heading to mid-state since I’ve heard the virus of Trooper Cocksuck made its way into the state watershed, like a pandemic airborne toxin it landed in Lake Mille Lacs, there are reports that an island of ooze and sinew and scales has grown in the middle of the lake that the locals have coined the Sirens of Cocksuck, all night they scream and sway in the dusk wind with their flummery and their three bare asses up to the sky waiting to be fucked by starlight, the walleye are attracted to their song and it’s all a design because the humans in boats are attracted to the walleye and the Sirens pull in the boats with underwater arms that look like Johnson trolling motors and the fishermen are devoured on site not sent overseas but eaten there and then and the Sirens shit out blood-hooks, the last remnants of John so-and-so lost to the waves and when the Sirens grow sullen of an evening they make landfall and harken to solid mass and wait on rooftops for house-dwellers to turn off the TV and then they invade the castles of men and women with mouths of molrs, front to back, theirs jaws are like a gators, they crush the heads of the sleeping to dust and walk out crabwise, stuffed, all of this according to their praxis, with thoughts of their fallen comrade, Trooper Cocksuck, supermost in their rum minds, everything ace-deuce-three. 

Octavia. Three weeks hence. The desk-clerk-kid that never showed, showed. Fucking on the steady, deep dick pounds, him to me, the same not true for the reverse, I ain’t hung, he doesn’t mind, who would, wood, puns and shit, taking aspirin, multi-vites, Cialis, restocked low t-pills, magnesium supplements and B12 liquids but not calcium on account of a full heart, injecting gin straight into the vein at this point, Verdi came and went on my face, I called him Verdi, come to think of it his name was Rasputin, gratis, Latin, can’t hold a candle to this shit, there but for the grace of you go I, I says, and he says let me lay one on thick and he comes all over me and we share gin and watch America’s next top murderer and it’s just the pres-elect and the v.p. who come wagging out with Clinton-Dix, and the doc. in this town thinks I need to be drowned, he told me over a BLT and I wouldn’t have it, killed off the town’s only doc, but again, dreams only, they come on of a sudden, not too drunk to dream, that’s just for poets and skylarks and the jerks who write songs in clubs to electro, not the real drunk-hetero-gays, me and the like, hats off to us and our ilk, pure jive when you listen to our jukebox talk, our thick shit that we lay on over plastic straws and we blame the dirty tap-lines when we pick up a case of flu, we go down to the oak and throw punches at bartenders who’ve slipped us the dirty trick and put us out for the sake of their wits, this tale is a testament to the euphoria of deep gin-fits, not unlike the dextro-soaked troopers get at the thought of running a pre-teen up a tree, it’s been quiet on their end lately, I’m told by the local recorder of news that the troopers are all at a conference near its end way off in Koochiching where the Minnesota State Patrol held a weekend conference to which Taco Ockerse was invited and the troopers pulled a prank by spiking Taco’s beer with purple drank and when he was in the throes of hallucinations, the troopers exhumed the corpse of the late Rev. Felix Rabbits from the local cemetery and Taco fucked it in a back kitchen of a VFW in front of a crowd of 15 or so, most guests had paid admission to see “Puttin’ on the Ritz” by the one and only but Taco got all necro on the late Rev. and everyone took a video and one made it onto the tok and the troopers, satisfied, turned to their sandwiches containing a yeast extract infused with flakka called TrooperMite, and once satiated, the conference turned into a pharm party where 60 or so prescription pill bottles were emptied into a salad bowl and the troopers took handfuls each in the hopes of death-oblivion and some of them reached it and were buried in turn. The Rev. Felix Rabbits wasn’t returned to his grave, nah, the troopers left him on the roof of a motel and when the wind gusted, the corpse blew onto a leafless gutter and tore in half all dusty-like, his torso blew out like a stuffed pillow and fell to the bushes. After the conference, the troopers dissolved their alliance with the church and did to the bishops and priests what the Hutu did to the Tutsi. There are few remaining church officials living, save for those unfortunates in the camps outstate. The church leadership was rounded up all together like and the very saints were brought back to life and sold like cattle to some goddamned Polish meat packing plant near Roseau. The saints are kept rural, cage-free and grass-fed inside fences painted monthly by nude Tom Sawyer look-a-likes all 18+ though. The troopers discovered that if you keep the saints cage-free and grass-fed, they engage in pederasty at only 1/3 the rate of the saints in cages and fed a diet exclusively of cornmeal. The troopers are working on USDA certification to get the saints into whole foods, but the application process was stalled when Trooper Otto E. Roddick slipped a government official a syringe of ketamine and got all sleep creep on her on the mall in D.C., but the trial ended in a hung jury with no retrial and he returned to Minnesota all elated and hooked on oxy and ketamine and asking himself why the “real world” must be the good one like some fucking Nietzsche freak, and he’s been captured on home surveillance cameras sitting on driveways pirating wifi connections and jacking off to ‘90s softcore and when he’s gone there’s little flakes of ketamine-junk burnt into the street. Trooper Roddick was one of the holdouts against the Trooper-Bishop dissolution, indeed, he’d been saving saints from the chopping block like a veritable Harriet T., there was an underground railroad for saints only, where missing children were forced into abominable acts for the saints along the way. 

And I’m ass-deep in Octavia. Gin-fits and dick-poundings with the clerk six in the seven and I pay the rent with cash, meth. and literary clichés. The county courthouse is a fucking beautiful monster. The kid at the front desk introduced me to the “Lot Lizard” – a truckstop whore with a mouth full of yellow and an all-too-human scant doubt, he had wetbrain by the age of 17 and goes in for truckers with Jacksons and old-timey VHS tapes to cuddle up to in-cabin. The Lot Lizard has a beard in which he hides a knife. Four truckers have met their maker after they tried to flee without settling up cash style. The Lot Lizard is a gruesome son of a bitch, he waits in locked bathrooms and hides in hand-dryers, there can be no doubt but that the lawyer scientists would study him, admire this creature and his barbaric elements and the way he flicks his anus up and makes the truckers see stars. The Lot Lizard makes his money with his ass and a not-defunct odor redolent of aristocracy that draws in truckers as they eat their pie, somehow the truckers, even the hetero-junkies, can’t resist the Liz. and his strange and vagrant theories on the American West, which they are all pop-eyed over and he draws them in and when the invite to their truck is inevitably dropped from their tongue, the Lot Lizard enters the truck cabin of some unsuspecting out-of-towner and they fuck doggedly and unreservedly, the Lot Lizard is famous for his lack of care and his threshold for pain, he has mastered his brain, mind over matter despite the liquor-delirium that won’t ever leave this man. He is known throughout the interstates like a black dog. Well so the kid introduces me to the Lot Lizard and we get along on account of a mutual friend in the name of spirits but the Liz. wants me to pony up cash after the transaction and I say no way and he pulls the knife and I duck and he misses and I catch him one right in the temple and the Liz. goes down and he’s out and the kid is crying like any whore does for his pimp despite the abuse and I learned that the Liz, a prostie himself, had been whoring out the kid and it turned out that my fucks with the night clerk were running up a grand bill kept by the Liz. in a three-ring with wide-rule and penciled accountings and no names just phone numbers and mine in there too when the Liz. was out cold I ‘napped the kid at gunpoint and took off from Octavia as fast as I’d burned into town, a pure jet, the kid crying but buckled ‘cause the Jag was beeping about an unbuckled passenger and I held the wheel and the gun and made the hostage listen to opera as I tore like hell over painted lines and around semis carrying drivers loyal to the Liz. and his truckstop-fuck-stories. 

It is rumored that the Liz. fled to sea with his first love, a bus driver named Bob who’d been on the lam for decades following an indictment for his involvement in a child porn distribution ring out of Jacksonville, and Bob fled the state and country, drove his long yellow straight to sea after transmuting into some grotesque sea beast with gills and the air-lungs sucked right out of him, he was transformed into a kind of flesh-plasma kraken that scrapes the sea floor for early life, when his sources for child porn were cut off he developed a depraved proclivity for young fish and other aquatic creatures, he set out to prey on and victimize the whole of the young marine. The elusive Sea-Bob, as he came to be known, once just a regular pedo. bastard, but who then went wicked transmute in the fashion of Trooper Cocksuck into a giant sea beast sans vertebrae with tentacles made of Twizzlers and a whale’s belly who crawls up the sides of boats and scrapes off clams and sea algae for his own sick delight. In his land days he drove a school bus and kept eyes on the young, to whom he handed out licorice treats in exchange for lap-rides, which he recorded spy-cam. Bankers boxes of polaroids going back to the ‘80s and a whole bunch of nasty, bizarre shit were seized in the raid on his one-story rambler. He keeps his bus in a deep abyss in international waters so as to avoid capture. The bus is filled with dead crustaceans, lewd pin-ups of minnows caught candid and the bodies of sexed-out sea urchins snuffed out in the dawns of their lives. For food, he hunts divers, and sustains his wretched body-functions with motor oil, licorice, dextro and ketamine in various archipelagos he’s named after sex idols. He invented a defense against sonar and other detection equipment to avoid run-ins with the U.S. and Chinese navies, and he’s even been known to lock onto a sub or two and mock the crews by leaving his licorice effluvium in the waters surrounding the young sailors. It is rumored that he’s lately been making landfall on the eastern seaboard – he allegedly started with capturing young animals in shallow waters that he committed to his undersea hell, where the young marine creatures are forced into dress-up and submitted to appalling jack-off-fits by the infamous Sea-Bob. The officials in the local sea town of St. —— deny that the Sea-Bob is striking land: they blame everything on the comings and goings of the tide, but the fishermen won’t have it. According to one fisherman, a beast named Jimbo with a whole tin of chew in his mouth: “Them missing baby crabs and turtles, it’s that greasy Sea-Bob cocksucker come up from the deep that made land fall. People says it was just the tide, but I seen the red licorice bits left ashore by that dirty cocksucker, it was he that ‘napped all those innocent baby turtles just hatched and they all gone down to Davy Jones with that son of a bitch. I nearly shot him off shore about 20 miles out St. Mary’s, but that cocksucker ate the bullets straight like some invincible, opened up that nasty octopus beak of his and swallowed the shots straight way, it was then I seen the young turtles in his gullet all a hollering rape and such. Had this other guy with him, guy with a beard and suited up in a Lewinski dress was riding his back like a cowboy and holding a knife, found out later it was legedly some truckstop whore called the Lizard who’s been riding rough with the Sea-Bob and taking liberties with juvenile starfish in the sea deep, those cocksuckers, heard that the Lizard rides on land to fill stocks of licorice for that Sea-Bob dicksmoker, if it was up to me, they’d wage war on that motherfucker and nuke his bus to kingdom come, nuclear fallout notwithstanding and such.” 

The Sea-Bob and the Liz., together at long last. They make any two troopers on earth appear as mere dainties. The entirety of the seven seas are now the subject of their splurge and chaos. The Sea-Bob goes about his business, as does the Liz. Only the Liz. has resorted to parlaying with swimmers in the hot waters off the Carib., like a wet dog he swims up for kennel rations and begs sex with dads and bachelors, wheedling them in with free sand dollars and a share of his headphones, which play In the Middle of the Night by Billy Joel on infinite cycle. But enough on the Liz., the Sea Bob – those fuckers will roam on at large longer than cockroaches. [later edit: found out the Liz. got sick of the Sea Bob, went back to truck-stopping, bruised his heart doing a standing 69 on cock-stilts with an overweight trucker and cardiac arrested his way out of all earthly existence. For his part, the Sea Bob went landside for a good year – the gills went all latent dormant like and his lungs grew back over a Thanksgiving dinner and the fucker could barely even hold his breath under water – he freaked out of an evening, went to coast, stole a scuba set, filled the tank with nitrous oxide, took a boat out at high tide and fucked off into a 12-foot swell, never to be seen again].

Chunks of flesh carved out of the living and fed to the dead, bells ringing, stars dying, and the whole substance of the earth swallowed whole by a single bang from a place so distant that all the gods in the universe and beyond could barely jack off in time to meet it by light speed. The die is cast. I am chased by troopers – dashes don’t you see, ketamine binges and stealing from the state’s suboxone clinics all ex professo and shit – pure gin-junk built up in me like Horace of Spain, greeted by the sexed out, doped out troopers like an ever-christian, though they’ll never find me – tearing out my hair mons pubis in moments of disgrace – the adverts for I-Need-More-Hair-Dot-Com are blowing out my brains – fistfuls of the low-t pills – dick-diving, drunk-driving, not giving a fuck, clearing my throat for life and non-life – visited the Liz’s grave, peed on it – standing 69 too dangerous for some – no warning labels – possible suit – civil liability –adulterated perversions have consumed me – no amount of washing – jumped on a bed with the emperor’s chambermaids (all whores) and they split my nipples with hot wax pro bono publico, dressed up in gin-wax, a whole hollywood strip of dancing idols thrown into Chinese slavery, a whole vast sea of malignant dwarves scraping scabs and selling ‘em for filthy lucre, I never wanted this life – born into it – bits of crack powder smoked in tinfoil and waiting on a stranger’s stoop with loaded shotgun and aftereffects of pure sin, there to serve out justice on all housewives bombed out at Costco and sucking on the utters of goats in chainmail, vapors rising, bleached out sockets where eyes once were, christening godfathers in golden shrimp baskets paid for by student loan interest and uttering “better ingredients, better pizza” until their very deaths – difficult to see – booze eyes on auto-blast – the narrowing of the field of vision right at the time I need it least – a conjunction of circumstances surrounding the damned (me) – I have never had more power in my elbow – god-damned deep gin-fits and bleary, methed-out escapades with the stolen clerk, he is my slave and I am his master-electra – deep down he loves me – we ride two deep and six-cocked in my jag-chariot-of-the-gods with a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary in case we’re stopped by the cops, he clutching a wormed-out flaked copy of the Judas Bible, I with two hands snaked on cock and a rum-gin mixture poured into vitamin water bottle Power-C friendly shakes me – tearing down ditches and back on road – center median, bang, still no coppers, no lights, no nothing but heavenly bells and the jubilation of forced third-party jack-offs in the Subway bathroom between bread choices and pre-slabbed turkey breast laid on with rubbers and the kid tries when I put the acid on, a good sport, took me thirteen months to write “good sport” – note that – “don’t try” on the all the graves in the small town – fuck, all of this hate erupting – Sisyphean at best – the clerk had to give me a douse in the chops to keep me awake on the road: account of a rum-gin-sprite mix we named “sprum” way back in Delano when we crept up on the twin cities and then fled back into meth territory safe and such – fucked up on meth and heroin: black shit they’re trucking in from the equator region – ketamine fix per day, per week hooked on barbeque crash-parties and we’re stealing coffees in gas stations and high-fiving with dicks deep into space – read the newspaper yesterday – tied shoes – banana – remembered vitamins – Bayer –heart exploding though not yet – kid tried to run from me when he saw flashing lights, turned out a tow truck and I shot him through the skin between his finger and his thumb to teach a lesson – lesson learned – found a stray dog and forced him to go down on it in the back of the Jag (the dog was a runt: all runts get their dicks sucked quid pro quo) – gave him sutures from stitching wire bartered for with meth cracker – typical dishwashing junkie – offered sex for score, the type – ate another piece of fruit somewhere along the way – vitamin thoughts, bombed out eight days a week, kid is getting antsy in his pantsy – me, me no jealous senor, yeah right, he’s a treasure – runs away again and I’ll kill him. Not to say I would or wouldn’t, to coin a phrase – flat foots in a flat-spin all around us – stopped once at a roadside checkpoint where Trooper Ketamine was whacking it to all passersby – brown trousers covered in gin-shit-semen demi-glaze – roadside set up to check for an abducted hotel clerk who was in my trunk and tied to the spare tire and drowned out by the political left – kid back in shotgun once passed checkpoint – kid crazy – don’t like it much – growing tired of him, contemplating tying him to a stone and then riverbank push under moonlight glitter – thoughts? – kid dead, end of kid/clerk/lover/stranger blown into misty abyss – smoked him – powdered gin bits light cracked and open taxed by the fraternity of the juniper – blazed out gin-junk fiends pawning toasters and cutting off the legs of frogs in youth to give story to later witness to school massacre – Trooper Cocksuck brought back to life by process of tit-osmotion, but there was a malfunction or two, he came back to life exhaling coke – his body produced it internally so he breathed coke at all hours and there was the main organ with a life of its own – his dick threw a tantrum and jumped off his body and went screaming off into the night young and insane all fashion-like and he hooked up with one of the ecosexuals out under waterfall fucking trees and velcroed to ass, velcro grew old like elastic and dick fell, came back to Trooper Cocksuck with his head held low and begging forgiveness and Trooper Cocksuck took him back subject to curfew and stitches from doctor V. (who played mandolin in sleep and talked of Paris and had a death certificate at the ready for the roads only seen at night by ogle-eyed cocksuckers waiting in green paint and huffing neon gases in saddle like the walking dead), but even with the dick attached and the life breathed into him, it was all for naught, Trooper Cocksuck had a bad sandwich that reminded him of the vice principal’s ghost and he took on Cotard’s delusion, the bastard walked straight off into a lake and didn’t do a damn thing about air, which is to say, the poor fucker breathed water into his lungs to the point of death – and death found him – finds everyone, knocks you spark out and leaves you all corpse style and the like – so you might as well have some fun and cure your soul dancing at the ex-patient social clubs put on by yours truly in the gin halls of all time run rampant and such, and I remember the teacher that told me once never to start with “and” and I don’t remember her name, but I do remember her essence and I wish I could crawl into a cave merely to die, not to write or find god or the afterlife or any of that schmaltzy innuendo or any of it, I’m through. 

Waking. Mirror. Booze eyes through which I can barely see – a filmy vapor that moves over the eyeballs. Knee is bleeding, knee is broke (kicked at bar by cuntface hogging juke). I look at myself. Bewigged, but not only that: a long wonderful dark brown mane with curls and knotted in clumps of meth/liquor/coke/ketamine/blood/bits/stuff/and traces of nightmare stardust. On top of that rouge, but not only that: deep lipstick and a coral gloss, plucked brows, too many earrings to count, and eye shadow and mascara found on the basest of sluts. And I’m in someone else’s dress torn to shreds and caked with neons and smears of the spectral dance of life-death, but not only that: pantyhose ripped to shit, underwear with foreign initials and autographed illegible and beneath it an infected site evidencing a cock piercing abandoned, but not only that, a secondary piercing on sack – successful, a pink stud. Bleary-eyed and shaky. Hung as fuck. Hung beyond all get out. The head is a bomb blasted, ears ring, the thump of the hung is screaming at me to die, and I am pleading to be given death only I can’t pull triggers at self or swipe blades across wrists-mine, or swallow pills convincingly, i.e. with effort and conviction, or bridge jump, no certainty in it since water’s soft, and no guts to go out in a car crash, what if I just break neck in a mangled Jag and sit around until the jaws of life rip me from the jaws of death, and all that jazz. Out of flakka, meth, coke, ketamine, nitrous, pills, morphine, gin and the like. All gone, not even trace amount to shove into eyeball, spinning, the hung is pounding me to earth, I fall, stand, fall again, take lamps and lampshades down to hell/floor/carpet full of dust junk. Old porn, the deep-rich-purple-hair-morning-glory-blood-thirsty-kind is screaming on the television, button broke, can’t find volume, no volume, can’t turn down, motel neighbor tenant pounding on wall on top of the hung-pound, unknown male body living and sleeping under downturned bed yonder two feet distant as the crow flies, sucking air, hung pounding me into tooth-brush fury, clothed shower in tub with no curtain (torn off and covered in alien prints), can’t hold up self, spin to tile, man in bed farts, rolls over (I check on this through head pounds), find cracked bottle of spiced rum, down contents, cut lip on broke neck, find its half-rum/half chewing tobacco, man in bed looks gruff, a chewer, probably a former baseball player or cop, or both, when he wakes he’ll kill me out of shame, I’ll plead on knees, give him the experimental writer line, and he’ll kill me in cold blood, I’ll see it in his eyes: “if the government finds out I’m queer, they’ll find a way to take my pension.” Best he keeps sleeping while I give him the slip, the room was paid in cash and put on credit to cover damages, have to cancel card, but they’re still be a digital print and a leopard print too, that one just for show, and through the hung I remember the cop pounding on me and scratching his nails into my back for lust-show-pleasure fix, a pleasure held by both consenting parties in the pastiche of Johnson v. Texas and I make it to the Jag, the clerk is long-gone, a figment, a fantasy for shower jack-offs and I put the gear in D and leave rubber and top out at hundred-and-something and I can sense the troopers on my ass, I left one of their fraternal order passed out in the bed wondering at the old man in the wig with scars of lust and the sounds of chimes and apparitional forebording as becomes any sexed-out cop act who breathes through lungs and stuff. 

But enough re this tale. I’m not in the business of rounding out stories, especially as my case is pending. And not just that – really, this story will end only at my death. I’m writing this in the midst of legal proceedings and sending the pages out to all the best agents and publishers in New York City. Someday I’ll write a book, get up the energy, turn these notes into a thriller, expurgate the put-on, focus only on the intrigue, maybe even stretch the truth a little. Maybe then I’ll hit the mark, even if it be mere chicken stock from a can: watered down shit. John Grisham shit. Patterson, Clancy, Connelly, Baldacci, Brown, shit, page-turning shit, action-shit, made-for-movie shit, where words like milk-punch and dithyramb are as out of place as a cosmic wormhole in the toenail of a pack donkey meandering up the ass of a queen. I’ll write it someday. Maybe then you’ll fall in love with me. This is the point where I kneel to posterity, hat off, hands in the sign of homage. And if you think “homage” is French for cheese, then, well, you’re at least paying attention to something, at least you like the way words sound.