javascript:void(0)
|
I imagine my deliverance coming in the form of a bottle of Klonopin I find in my pocket and take with me into the bathroom. Going out on a handful of '90's designer drugs, frothing at the mouth and thinking of pigeons and insects, millions of insects; fade to black, maybe white as a final electrical surge jolts through my occipital lobe in one last desperate bid, on the image of Piccadilly Circus as I saw it, chasing pigeons as Underworld's ?Born Slippy? pulses through my head. As such my prayers go unanswered, and we are only at the half-way point. When we boarded, and I plopped down, I instantly went through a Rolodex in my head and settled on the Ramones. I was going to do it. I was actually going to stand up and start screeching out ?I Wanna Be Sedated!? I thought the better of it and sank further in my seat.
Billy Corgan wailing in my ear isn't helping. In a desperate bid for entertainment I almost get into a swedge w/ the bloke in front of me who keeps tilting his seat back; two sweaty half-formed men taking potshots, jabbing a' each other up 'n down the aisles like a human version of Amores Perros. Look at me. At this point I look like a Ralph Steadman sketch. Sweat lashes off me.
The clouds outside my window, they're the kind killed Buddy Holly. I'm borderline breaking down, George Clinton is screaming ?free you mind and your ass will follow! The Kingdom of Heaven is within!? and I'm muttering along, almost like a mantra and maybe this is how the Manson chicks felt when Charlie gave 'em that Merry Pranksters shit, fresh from the Owsley Stanley pipeline.
The plane managed to land, skeleton at the controls, a place called the Twilight Zone...
Help me Dr. Octagon, I'm on my way out
A Taxi sputters up to the curb and I throw the door open to be greeted by a gaping hole and the cheap cement it opens onto. The cabbie stares at me through the side mirror.
?You gettin' in??
I place the suit case next to me on the backseat, shut the door and lift my legs, propping them against the back of the cabbie's seat. I have my hand firmly on my case to prevent it from sliding around and alternate between looking at up the sights through the window and past the highways ? mostly peeling billboards, and palm trees with leaves reaching up just over the barricades - and down at the blur of concrete gliding past.
?You could at least put down at net. Or something.?
?Tha's a good idea!?
I ring the bell at check-in and the clerk, a pygmy, pops up. I guess kinda like Steve freakin' Buscemi in that Cohen brothers movie. And like that Cohen brothers movie, he acts as bellboy too.
He waddles on his stubby legs, carrying my case and jangling the room key.
The Immoral Mr. Teas ? that's his name ? ?The Immoral Mr. Teas? ?
?Like the Russ Meyer movie?? He ignores me when I ask him that ?
was sunbathing on the deck, his trunks the same dark red flesh color as him. He didn't just have a beer gut, he had the whole beer keg hanging down over his cock. Sunglasses he never took off. Straw hat capping off a face too ovaloid for the rest of his body.
At first I thought we got the wrong room. Then Hervé Villechaize here explains that, because of my parsimoniousness, I was stuck sharing the room with this sun-tanned abomination.
I sat in a swivel and turned to face the small desk the room came with. The double doors open, an ocean breeze ruffled the page I'd stuck into the Smith-Corona ? same typewriter Lester Bangs used ? while I bang out this story. National Lampoon's Fear and Loathing Sounds fitting.
Teas is out, no doubt terrorizing local bar waitresses with his fabled uncut Harry Reems windmilling about.
Another night, Teas takes me out drinking in a canteen not far from the plasterboard shack that guide books still classify as a hotel.
He orders that tequila these rubes drink with the worm in them ? in most cases, a moth larva. A shot for him, and I get the shot with the drowned worm in it. I wasn't even looking when I took the shot and only after I'd swallowed did the sick fuck point it out.
?Eh??
?Very horrorshow, comrade.?
I jot all this down. He looks over my shoulder.
?It's Mezcal you blind bastard, not freakin' tequila.?
He then explains the difference and I politely nod.
I still have no clue.
I think the morning after the next is when Teas took me to see the execution. This small Latin American joint, the closest we still have to a banana republic this side of the 21st century - though with blow instead of fruits, a pygmy-sized Pablo instead of Sam the Banana Man, a single, holistic cartel in place of United Fruit ? still had policies borrowed and left over from Augusto Pinochet's tenure down in Chile.
Ten little Che's, all in a row.
Feuer Frei!
Ten little corpses doused in lye.
Guerrilleros Heroicos es Muertos.
Write that down.
Teas ordered the bartender to mix us a couple Pisco Sours. That was last night or some other night.
I could go for one now, I tell Teas.
He tells us he could make them, but that he can't be arsed.
He lazily makes us a pitcher of Caipirinha and we take it out onto the beach.
Night surf.
We finish off half the pitcher and slowly sing ?Nightswimming?, fumbling the words as we try to remember Michael Stipe's lyrics.
Less than 24 hours later, I see this guy get a glass bottle upside the head. We're at the same dirty canteena we are most nights at that point. Someone hits the jukebox and this guy gets up from the table where he's drinking with his buddies and starts doin' the Jean-Claude dance from Kickboxer. We're all applauding. Then, the table next to his is flipped over and these two putas are at each other's throats. Spanish Muscles-from-Brussels over there tries to get in the middle only to wind up needing stitches after they pick shards out of his scalp an hour later.
I saw a man die today. Another one. This one went the full Pinochet.
We crowded a grassy area off to the side of a helipad. They ushered a bald-headed communista into a chopper, already whirling and kicking up blades of grass. It ascended ? I ask Teas standing next to me and he guesses maybe 'tween seven and nine-thousand feet. Then we watch a shape plummet, smashing into the pavement a few dozen yards away from us.
...Teas dragged me to a whorehouse, only for us to stop a block away, watching as it got raided.
...A trabajo chopping sugar cane with a cane knife collapses after a snake pops out between the stalks and fangs him.
...Beachgoer - Girl ? dragged out to sea by a rip tide. I didn't stick around to watch the rescue.
...All the Pisco Sours you can drink. No worms, too.
Tuesday. I don't think I saw anything as dramatic as Tiananmen Square, but I think I came close. A tank about to roll over a crowd of protestors before they dispersed.
Wednesday. Saw Teas chatting with a girl leading a donkey by a leash. They went off together, all three of them. Let strangers stay strangers.
Thursday. Today, I had a slim piece; then I had a thick piece. Well, some of that's true. One outta two ain't bad
Friday. TV. Teas rocking in a corner of our room, bloodshot eyes. Praying he doesn't molest me.
Saturday thru Sunday ? the lost weekend. Bats! Bats comin' out the walls! Was that the movie with Ray Milland?
The following Tuesday, I thumb through a copy of Cosmo. Used.
A small brush fire. Teas sez: eh, we're on the coast. Where's it gonna go?
Stay up into the early morning hours watching The Wages of Fear and its American remake Sorcerer.
When later we get plastered, we bullshit about driving a truck over a rope bridge, like in the William Friedkin movie. We realize that wouldn't work. We try a Jeep instead.
Thursday? ? Teas didn't really die. But we attended his funeral anyway. Me as myself, Teas as his twin, Deas. We shake hands with mourners and funeral crashers. Closed casket. A simple pine box, already hammered shut. ?Wild Horses? plays. We lower the wood into the earth. There. That should satisfy Teas' loan sharks.
We hit up a betting parlor on the way to the hotel. Now it's Deas' turn at crippling debt.
Another lost weekend, partially reconstructed. This is the last one.
Wednesday night and Thursday morning; watch a Lethal Weapon marathon on TV, all dubbed in Spanish. Fight off Teas' advances. He sleeps on the beach. Tries to get back in during the night by way of the French doors on the deck. Breaks the wooden railing falling backwards after I karate kick his ass outta the room.
Thursday morning. More crap on TV. Quick breakfast followed by a mad dash to the airport.
Departure Time.
On the tarmac, I eye de plane! suspiciously.
?Can that bird even fly??
?It's as fit for the air as Titanic was for water.?
I opt to charter a fishing vessel instead, in the end taking two weeks to island hop across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
And all this is mostly true.
Mostly.
At least, it happened to someone.
That goddam worm doesn't make you hallucinate. That's just a lie rubes will tell you.
And there's a stark contrast between Tequila and Mezcal. So I'm told.
Me, Mother, Father and our Grandfather.
Grandmother had died a few weeks ago, we were still extremely sad about it.
Mother couldn't stop crying and Father wouldn't let us speak about it.
She had left us very little money when she died, but just enough to do something with it.
"What will we do about the money?" I whispered quietly
"We should sell her house for it," Said Mother.
"I think we should build a waterslide in the back garden!" I shouted out excitedly.
"goo-goo-ga," said our little baby, mess.
Sorry that I forgot about mess at the beginning- well at least you know her now.
"WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!" Barked our brown dog, mucky- yup, mucky by name and mucky by nature too.
The dog barked until we were all quiet, so it could go back to sleep peacefully and quietly
"But she didn't leave much money," said Mother- she had a point.
"To tell you the truth-there's over 8 feet of snow outside," I reminded him.
"pfft! Are you scared of some frozen water?!" He yelled "well, I'm not!"
So that's how we all agreed to go on a family vacation together.
WOO HOO!!!
The day of the holiday is today!
We packed our bags (all of us except mess, the baby of course(we left our dog with auntie small)) and headed on the road!
What I mean with that was that we couldn't open the door as we were locked inside by snow, and we decided to jump out of the window (all except grandfather of course, we decided it was best to leave him with auntie small too).
If you think we are super crazy to jump out of the window, you are right.
But, because the snow was so high up, it was more like jumping 2 meters down, and landing in the soft snow.
POOF!
Snowflakes shot into the air like feathers from a cut-open pillow when you jump on them too.
Then we had our next problem as well.
We couldn't find the car.
We searched and searched for it- it was no use.
It was buried deep into the snow below
All of a sudden our holiday getaway vacation was fading.
And fast...
We tried to get a shovel and dig it all up, but it was no use, it wouldn't ever work.
It would take us days on end to get all of that snow off, and besides, who knows where the car was? No one had used it recently as it was so cold.
Mother got the idea to get the mini transportable heaters out, to help us melt the snow, but those things didn't even barely work, they would melt all of that snow it over two years! or maybe even more.
Mess helped out by drooling into the snow, which to be honest with you- wasn't helping that much.
This time, it was mucky who saved the day!
It pointed with it's nose to something weird sticking out of the snow... something that looked like a long metal stick.
"The antenna!" I cried out.
Everybody looked at me like I was crazy.
So- in no time we had received the car from the snow, and opened it up.
The doors magically opened and we all climbed inside.
Father started the engine.
It was a miracle!
It worked!
Nothing was frozen!
Everybody was shocked (happy shocked, not the bad type of shocked).
I looked up into the sky.
"Thank you Santa" I whispered.
I don't know if it was me going crazy or what- but I think I heard Santa reply: "HO! HO! HO!"
We rode in the car for some time-and then Father turned onto the highway.
Mother woke me up and said that we were already at the airport.
"That fast?" I asked as I opened my eyes.
"Well- you WERE asleep for 2 hours," chirped in Father
Mucky started licking my face.
"YUCK!" I laughed as we all got out of the car, our holiday was finally going to begin...
There weren't many people here, as there was so much snow and no one really had the time to go on a holiday... except us, I smiled.
There was a short line, and then we put our bags onto the large and long conveyor belt.
It was after we walked some time that we forgot all about Mess, who thought the conveyor belt was some kind of ride, and then we got the baby back.
Although, I was pretty sure they had done nothing with them, but just to be on the safe side, I opened father's wallet to see if it wasn't empty inside.
If I said I didn't take a few pounds or pence from the wallet, then I'd be LYING.
After about 1-2 hours later Mother said our gate was now open, we went forwards a while, and I was trying to spot a big metal gate like a fence in front of me, only to find no such thing.
We went through A very long passage way, until we were all outside, I asked Mother and Father if we were lost, but they just pointed to a plane near by, and I nearly automatically knew that we weren't.
We climbed up the steps of the plane, until we found our seats and all sat down together.
I looked out of the window as we got higher and higher.
It got even more and more exciting.
So, exciting- that in fact I dozed off after a couple of minutes
Father woke me up, we had to wait a bit and then we went down the steps again.
The sand was soft between my fingers as I moved my feet about.
The bright, warm sun was shining all upon me, much better than cold damp snow.
Is this a dream? I asked myself, but when Mess threw up all over me, I knew it was a firm ?NO!'.
0 Responses to The Wrench Mechanics Are Using To Make Life Easier