New Year’s Eve in Holmesburg

It was New Year’s Eve in Holmesburg. December 31st. Just like any other year a crowd was gathering around the firehouse at Rhawn Street and Frankford Avenue waiting for midnight and the annual dropping of the pants. The pants were old and battered, mostly black with some gray from wear. Any new holes that had grown since last year had been patched for the occasion.

I don’t have documents or other proof, but enough people have said the same to me that I guess it’s true. The pants once belonged to a state assemblyman for the area. He’d been found without his pants on in compromising circumstances, and skipped out the back door of a local row house without them. A firefighter coming home witnessed the embarrassing situation. Considering himself an offended party that firefighter took the pants back to the firehouse where he proceeded to run them up the flagpole. There they flapped in the wind just below our nation’s flag.

As I heard it the assemblyman tried to negotiate the return of his pants or at least his wallet and  belt. He used back channels to avoid more exposure. He’d had enough of that when he ran bare assed from the house, across the street and into Pennypack Park right next to Lincoln High School. He hid there in the bushes until his personal driver came to his rescue.

The firefighters rallied round their offended brother and helped him broker a good bargain. The assemblyman got his wallet and belt, but the station kept the pants. They kept the pants flying until their colleague received compensation for his pain and suffering. Some say this was cash. Some say real estate. Others say it was a promotion and transfer to another firehouse. As it turned out the deal was finalized, so they say, on the last day of December, and the pants came down from the flagpole at midnight.

This is local lore. I can’t vouch for the truth. All I can say is the ceremonial lowering of the pants on New Year’s Eve is a longstanding tradition that had to have gotten started some way.

Children line the avenue as the clock ticks down. Teenagers and adults flow out of the bars to watch. Fireworks, illegal for the most part, are poorly concealed on porches and in driveways waiting to be lit. A pair of firefighters in full regalia, ready for a six alarmer exit the station and walk towards the flagpole. They take hold of the rope and begin to slowly lower the pants. By the time the pants have completely dropped it’s midnight. A new year. Champagne. Beer. Fireworks. And occasion gunfire. That’s what makes the night come alive. Will worry about the dead and wounded in the morning.

There will be partying until daybreak. But not for the pants. The pants are headed to the laundry to be washed, dried, and pressed. They will be stored away until next December 31st, when another crowd will gather to watch the pants descend, and shout “Happy New Year!”

Bonnie and Clyde of the Hawthorne Hotel

The park grass folded with moister and pressed by four bricks of snow. Clyde looked like the park’s frozen statue on a green bench. He store at warm yellow windows of the Hawthorne Hotel. He salivated to eat them like blocks of warm cheese. And his growling stomach tilted the heads of curious crows. He accepted his numb limbs as one would an unhinged heartbeat. You just let the seconds sting your body’s vulnerabilities. He replayed in his mind, several Christmases back; sitting Indian style on a crimson hearth rug at his father’s Victorian house. Having a stomach filled with turkey, mashed potatoes, and red wine. His father landed; suffocating the sofa cushions with his beer belly; than clicked on a N.Y. Giant’s receiver dancing in a white end zone. His body drafted air thick in raw garlic, Merlot, and Old Spice aftershave.

“Dad can you see me?” Clyde said. He panned the black theater of the universe as it trickled snow upon his eyelids. A gust of New England waved the branches and gave the charcoal sky, umber veins. A young lady—blonde, bundled in a swollen pink, walked close. Her irises bounced around blue as the surface of the north Atlantic. She looked at him three times and crunched the fresh snow. “Do you have any food?” she said.

“I’m starving sweetheart,” he said. Clyde stroked the blood-stained knife case that strangled his tube sock. Her face’s beauty stretched his cock’s muscles.

“May I sit?” she said.

“Sure.”

“I’m Bonnie,” she said.

“Pretty,” he said.

The cold green planks stung her tailbone parts not cushioned by fat. She listened to the orchestra of hunger playing in Clyde. Snow trickled like confetti on their tongues as they both squinted towards the empty park. Their aligned heads panned across the untouched blanket of snow.

“How can we eat?” she said. “I had a job walking dogs until a stray dog attacked them. News traveled and I was out of work. The dogs loved me more than their owners. But not the snobby poodles, you know.”

Both looked to the sun—a tone of midnight moon, imprinted on a pond rock sky. They both anchored their faces to look upon each other. Clyde’s eyes: emerald green and empty— empty of creativity. But handsome with a carved wooden face, he pulled up a smile.

“You are not bad looking,” she said.

“You look like Angelina Jolie,” he said.

“If we are so beautiful, why are we going to starve to death?”

A limo rolled the snow lumps behind them. Three windows long, it stopped. The exhaust pipe rattled streams of twirling grays. A tinted reflection blurred their heads like a rattled puddle. Motorized; the window opened down. An older man with a pipe and thick black government glasses said. “What are you two kids doing out here?”

“Freezing our asses off,” Clyde said.

Bonnie elbowed Clyde’s armpit. The brief pain enraged him. Instead of punching her neck; he strangled the green teak—the closest thing.

“We are hungry mister,” she said. Bonnie refolded a creased photograph of a white cat with chilled glass eyes: one blue; one green.

Silence ruled as the endless snow tickled the delicate edges of twigs. The limo ticked and idled. The old man sucked the wood flavored pipe into his saliva. Bonnie studied Clyde’s eyes; they sat in his sockets like two hardened pebbles.

“Buy us dinner?” Clyde said.

“I’m Victor…meet me inside the Hotel,” he said.

The three met in the dining room around a white-clothed table. Bonnie sat next to Clyde and Victor across. The waiter passed long laminated menus out and splashed ice and water into three large wine glasses. “Bread?” he said.

“Two baskets, lots of butter,” Victor said.

“What do you want?” Clyde said.

Victor washed the wood flavor off his tongue crunching an ice cube. The cold burned his upper teeth. “I have a twenty-year-old nephew upstairs: a virgin; I would appreciate it if you could cure him of that.”

“You want her to fuck your nephew over a steak dinner?” Clyde said. “Then toss us back out in the snow?”

Victor swallowed the puzzle of an ice cube. He contemplated them, burying a scowl, like two upright cockroaches polluting his table. His limo driver sat in the distance; an unfolded newspaper on a bar stool by the fireplace. “I will get you a room, next to mine, for entire week, we stay. You, my dear—will fuck my nephew for breakfast and dinner, and you both will be fed. Then; you are back out to freeze to death.”

Clyde palmed Bonnie’s jeaned knee cap. “I will supervise so there is no funny business.”

“I will too,” Victor said.

A black spider the size of a grizzly bear came through the bar door. Naked; furry legged; with still, reflective eyes; it found Clyde. Victor ordered wine as the spider walked to the table. Clyde imagined the insides of the spider’s fuzzy rear-end that tilted towards the ceiling. Clear poison dripped on the carpet under the arachnid’s eyes. The poisonous gloss played Clyde’s portrait like two television sets.

“Rib eye for both my guests, Reynold,” Victor said.

The spider’s black shape morphed into a red pour of Clyde’s glass. His madness cleared like a dissipating fog.

An Armenian in a tight dress shirt wearing a heavy black watch handed Clyde a room key card. “You are in 237 and we are in 238,” Victor said.

Everyone shared an elevator to the sixth floor. Crystal chandeliers and a long-flowered carpet laid a path to Victor’s oak door. Brian, hunched in a Steelers jersey, hammered the buttons on a game controller. “Hey Uncle,” he said.

“Brian this is…,” Victor said. His expression bulged with eyeballs made of ice cream dripping for two quick answers.

“I am Clyde, and this is Bonnie,” Clyde said.

“Undress please,” Victor said. “I’m a busy man and if I’m to support everyone, I must work, haven’t I?”

Bonnie dropped her jaw on Clyde’s blankness. Thanks for standing up for me. She thought.

“You heard the man, sweetheart,” Clyde said.

The three men watched Bonnie’s slim figure climb out of her bundled pink womb to exhibit: a firm ass, a round bubble-butt, a flat-iron stomach, and a large set of swinging tits that glowed as she nested her clothes on a cushioned chair.

“You are the best uncle.”

A 19-year-old erection in a football jersey waddled behind her. He fumbled with a condom and littered the purple wrapper by his feet.

“Whiskey?” Victor said.

“Hell yes,” Clyde said.

Both men sat on the edge of a king mattress and watched Bryan’s pale ass jiggle in the lamp light. In mid thrust, he ripped off his Steelers jersey. He cupped Bonnie’s tits, which suspended a left and right sway. His tongue dropped like a cash register drawer—eyes rolled back like the sun being devoured by a horizon.

“Oh, oh, oh fuck, oh fuck,” Brian said. “Ugh……. fuck, oh, fuck.”

Brian swallowed her strawberry shampoo through his burning lungs as the condom drooped down like a cream filled water balloon.

Bonnie wore the large black spider like erotic lingerie. She turned and its eight legs covered everything but her vagina and breasts. Clyde jabbed Victor’s Adams Apple and splashed his knuckles into the spider’s mirrored eyes. Seamen, flying puddles of whiskey, and two men plopped to the carpet.

“You do this after I was sexually assaulted?” Bonnie asked.

They filled their pockets with watches, folded cash—clipped in gold clips, rings, two leather wallets, and a silver .38 revolver. They bantered.

“You have a very nice ass,” Clyde said.

“Fuck you…and why are they not getting up?” she said.

“I used to box,” he said.

“You wait until after I am…,” she said.

They took the elevator down to the basement. The vast cement floor—empty of furniture, covered in crimson red throw carpets. A micro-library with two lavender sofas—lantern lit up the corner. The sweet odor of bleach tickled Clyde’s nostrils. “This way,” he said.

The laundry room had blue air, rattling cycles, pungent chemicals that sparked the musty gravity.

“The chemical smell and industrial atmosphere makes me horny,” Clyde said.

“So you like cleanliness,” Bonnie said.

They both found a mop room—dim lit by a red bulb. The shelves, jam stocked with blue soap bars wrapped in plastic paper. Clyde’s blood-stained thumb pushed the dead bolt over. He turned to Bonnie and kissed the corner of her frown.

They found a steal pipe ladder; climbed it into the laundry room’s attic. Into a four-foot-high splintered room with ancient plywood. Pink cotton spilled out the walls. The soft odor of bleach streamed up a vent.

“It should be safe here…let’s sleep,” Clyde said.

“Well at least it’s warm,” she said. “What if those thugs find us?”

“I’ll kill them,” he said.

The heat undressed the two of them. Clyde slid the revolver and goods (mowing down splinters) into the dark shapes. Bonnie laid into him with her back turned. Her voice erupted as he took in the cuteness of the back of her ear. It looked like a flower with three freckles. She spoke from her belly with words that tasted rich of strawberry perfume. He placed his rough palm on her thigh.

“I do not think we are bad people,” she said. “We are artists and artists are meant to suffer.” Her feminine voice shook her long body and vibrated the creases in her swan-like neck.

“You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” Clyde said.

“You are too, big boy,” she said.

“I’m am sacred and I want you to be inside of me,” she said.

Clyde peaked down the milky valley of her lower back and ass. His penis–ached–hard as it jabbed her firmness. She felt his masculine stiffness and backed into it. Her insides soaked, he entered. She moaned and started talking.

“I think you are a good man…,” she said.

Clyde’s entire soul politely invaded her. Like a beast and protector looking to find peace with pleasure. They both became one. Clyde sucked on her ear lobe as her voice erupted. Each vowel exhaled: feminine, sweet, vulnerable, with the scent of fresh pruned garden.

“I feel we are one…,” she said.

The vibration of her body and her sweet voice touched Clyde to a point of absurd numbness and electricity. “Oh God,” he said.

Everything that strangled his childish thoughts for most his life, spilled into her. The delicate flooding lasted several seconds. It spilled and splayed warmness that both felt. She leaned into him and both their lips stuck together like stickers.

Clyde rolled over and dusted the splinters off his naked ass. He wobbled to a gunshot hole that trickled in New England’s frost. The winter freshness kissed his eye as he looked yonder. Two lanterns lit a sign of the small-town bank next door.

“What do you see out their love?” she said.

“Get some rest,” he said.

Dead Dog Day, Chapter 5

The strip was jammed-fuck full of ass-fuck tourist scum scurrying around bitching about the heat and searching for cheeseburgers. In response to this sudden demand, the owner of the cantina got her chefs to get sinisterly creative and scrounge for an unmentionable mixture of ground-up critters and refuse. The new recipe was a tremendous hit, but the gut-wrenching indigestion that followed was a surrealistic torture, cruel even through my own irredeemably corrupted eyes, its victims hunched over and screaming and crying from the fuckery that was Voodooing the plagued miles of intestine held inside these poor fucks. There was a line up to the cantina’s door and and another line leading out into the street and towards the public restrooms, which were quite medieval in design, having no toilets and no toilet paper, just a hole in the ground without any support bars to brace yourself for the inevitable evacuation. There were two main ways an ass was going to handle this fuckery: One, a volcanic burst, followed by a macabre holocaust of shit splatter covering the entire buttocks and walls around you, in which case a decision had to made about sacrificing a sock or two to either wipe up the devastating mess or walking around for the rest of the day smelling like a shit-stained skunk. The other way this could all go down, if one was lucky, was by birthing a super-condensed shit ball, tight and hard and twice the size of any enjoyable sodomy, but after a few excruciating squeezes of the sphincter would result in mostly just blood that had to be cleaned up.

The strip was truly an ass-fuck circus of straw hats, golf-shirts and khaki shorts, socks and sandals and fucking fanny packs; the ass-fucks were buying up all the shit jewelry and other indiscernible trinkets made by monkeys, and their women wore mostly shit-made uncomplimentary gruesome sundresses and hard leather sandals fastened with soles made from used car tires, tripping all over themselves, feet like raw hamburger meat, convinced they’d eventually work them in.

Meanwhile, the monkeys came out in fucking hordes, pretending at first to entertain the tourists with stupid-ass fucking monkey tricks. They played their roles well, acting as docile playthings and amazing the tourists with their seemingly curious close proximity. There’d be no shit throwing today, though; those little bastards were there for one purpose: money. They were going to rob the fuck out of these fuckheads, it was an easy scam if you were a monkey, all they had to do was play stupid-fuck monkey, crawl all over the joyful tourist, play with his hat a bit while the wife took pictures, and bingo, the monkey would leave the scene with everything but the dumbfuck’s boxer shorts; fuck, those cunts were bright.

Dem had been staring at me for a fucking while now, looking like a three-legged puppy that had lost his bone to a bigger three-legged puppy. I knew what he was thinking, and with this extravaganza of excellent targets going by like waving flags, I couldn’t force him to restrain his true nature, to continue to hold back his obviously sorrowful constrictions. “Okay buddy, but no fucking amputations!” I finally relented. Joyful as a kid about to tear the wrapping off a present he knew he was getting, Dem reached into his magical bag of fuckery and pulled out a handful of mini dynamite sticks, ready to cause minimal but still destructive chaos on the strip.

Captain Edgar was surprisingly in great form; currently sporting one of his Jolly Roger t-shirts and carrying an actual working lightsaber we all thought had fucking died from sand, salt, and battery acid ages ago. Fucked if I knew how it was even functioning anymore, but there it was, all lit up like the real thing. Along with this abrupt rejuvenation, Edgar had also, to our wretched disgust, picked up his old pirate inflection, which Dem quickly put to a sinister halt by shoving a lit stick of dynamite down the ass end of his pants. Thank fuck it was just a little one, we didn’t need Edgar walking around with a giant gapping bloody asshole in need of urgent hospitalization, but he certainly did get the point.

Presently, what we needed was a view from the roof; it was the best vista for perusing the docks from afar, and we needed to steal a boat that would serve our very specific fucking needs this evening. The cantina’s owner had a special hidden patio up there, the use of which she was more than happy to lend to our sorry asses. The one obstacle in getting up there was that the would-be stairs were actually just a rope that hung down over the ass end of the building. We’d traversed this route many a time and easy it was not, but with a few scrapes, falls, concussions and general buffoonery along the way, we finally made it up up there. The owner had also had a botched-up dumbwaiter installed by her last monkey construction crew, however it did seem to work on the odd occasion, so we wouldn’t be left completely dry up there. Actually, Edgar once got his ass stuck in there, I’ve no idea how he even got into the wretched thing in the first place, but he was stuck in it for about a day and a half, we had to lube him up with carnivorous plant goop and dislocate both his fucking shoulders to get that ass-fuck freed.

We settled in quite nicely. With a fine view of the harbor as well as all the insipid mayhem taking place in the streets below, we were perched like the kings of our own little castle of fuckery, Christ! It would’ve been wicked just to hang our johnsons over the railing and piss all over the ass-fucks down there, but damnit, we had a job to do. Dem pulled out a pair of super-binoculars so I could scope out the boats in the harbor. Dem was in his all his glory up on the roof, seemingly being almost perfectly designed for dropping dynamite on passersby. One of the sticks actually fucking exploded in the air in front of this one asshole, with the blast blowing his hat and toupee right off his goddamn head. Dem was psychotic, but in a really kind of botched-up rollercoaster kind of way. I knew he’d probably kill anyone including me at the drop of a hat, but he was a hilarity of fuckery and fun that you just didn’t find much anymore.

Meanwhile, Edgar had gone off to the other side of the patio area, where he was now practicing some kind of slow, fucked-up martial arts thing with his lightsaber. It might have been some sort of fucked meditation or Star Wars thing for all we knew,. Dem and I had had several conversations about the state of Edgar’s mind, and we’d decided that to whatever fucking degree, he was certainly goddamn retarded.

Come to think of it, Dem and I never came to know exactly how or why the fuck Edgar had ever ended up on the island. He was so incredibly simple-minded, it was hard to believe that he could get himself into any illegal fuckery unless by accident. On the island it was considered rude and not the goddamn business of any fuck-hole to pry into information about the stories that led people here; those questions were left for the individual themselves to reveal, and ignoring this could get your ass tortured off in the jungle somewhere, no chance of a quick and easy death or even a courtesy ride back.

Dem and I had held more than a few late-night ponderings concerning Edgar’s true origins. The one we liked the best was that he was the estranged retarded embarrassment of some super-rich family that was attempting to cover up Edgar’s pedophiliac misadventures and other fuckery that was really fucking impossible to keep out of the papers. Edgar’s escapades becoming more and more public, the family finally gave him a trust fund, one large enough to keep him the fuck away with no reason to ever return. What can I say? I’m an asshole, and this asshole just found the instrument of our soon-to-arrive disastrous fuckery, all served up on a platter by the devil himself.

Fuck! There is was: A fucked-up macabre, sinisterly nostalgic combination of fiberglass and dual motherfucking propulsion with decal-striped nuances of gradient red, orange and yellow shimmering in the setting afternoon sun. She was a beautiful beast with copious features, a cigarette boat straight out of Miami Vice with the dimensions (bow to stern) seemingly going on forever. This was our diamond in the shithouse; with the unbelievable length and uselessness of the long front end, we could pack the fucker full of explosives, giving rise to an unintended plan B, where if plan A got ass-fucked sideways we could still ram our goddamn kamikaze boat straight into the cruise ship’s rock-fucked hull. However, some fuck would have to drive the overloaded explosive projectile, which by all accounts would probably be my sorry ass.

We could see the magic light coming over the mountains, covering everything in a blanket of orange. It was a beautiful time of day, even the trash on the strip looked like a master’s impressionist painting, but beauty was one thing and blowing up a cruise liner full of smack was another, and the magic light would soon turn to darkness. We finished up a few more drinks, bumped a lot of PCP, and dropped a few hits of this new acid the cantina’s owner had given us to try out. Next, we had to we had to zip up to Dem’s, because we hadn’t anticipated needing the extra explosives for our recently selected Miami Vice boat. I fucking hated going up to Dem’s, especially with the long jungle shadows fucking with your sight along the way. Plus, the whole place was fucking wired to blow. Given even the slightest misdirection, you could end up indiscernibly shot to pieces all over the fucking jungle. So, Edgar and I waited back on the trail a bit and let Dem go get whatever we needed on his own. He came out of his jungle hut carrying duffle bags full of fucking crazy-looking munitions, shit I’ve never even seen before. I guess Dem was busting out a special collaboration of fuckery that goes boom on the monstrous atrocity side of complete destruction, which by all accounts was exactly what we needed, and only a few hours to do it in.

Darkness fell across the island as the noise settled exclusively along the strip. Predictably, the tourists were taking full advantage of the utter lack of drinking and drug laws, and most of them would inevitably be laid prostrate, unconscious, dead and scavenged for valuables, all over the ground and barroom floors before the morning light. The only other sounds of any concern were of three buffoons for hire, hammered on booze and PCP with some unknown, untested form of acid that was now crawling up the spine of the three buffoons in question. We were right properly fuck-assed pissed, fighting over who’s carrying what, stepping all over each other. At one point Dem fucking clocked Edgar for no fucking reason at all, Edgar fell off the docks twice, and fishing his stupid ass out was slowing us the fuck down. Once we found our boat, I went straight to the clusterfuck of wire guts that were connected to the ignition; this would usually be Dem’s job, but he was fucking all busy with constructing the right formula for a gargantuan wrath of god type explosion in a very cramped space. As I worked to hot wire the damned thing, all was silent down below, that is until I heard Dem say, “If you don’t turn that goddamn thing off I’m gonna shove it up your fucking ass, pull it out your mouth, and shove it right fucking back up your cocksucking ass!” Dem always hated that fucking lightsaber.

Before too long, the fucking boat engines blasted to life like a goddamn rocket ship. We’dd originally planned to paddle the fucking thing away from the shore, but no use in subtlety anymore; we’d probably woken half the monkeys on the island already, so we untied ourselves from the dock and cruised out as quietly as this monstrosity could. We’d have to watch the fuel as well; we’d brought extra but these speed machines were made to go fast and not very fucking long.

It was then I began to sense a new oddity within my already debaucherously contaminated high-octane type of fucked; I was right on and fucked all crazy like, but there was a wretchedly wonderful surreal attack on my wave link, or buzz gauge, like an introduction to a new fashion of fuckery that was parading up and down the runways in my head. The boat’s helm felt like jelly, and I was seeing shit everywhere that most fucking definitely wasn’t there; I called up Dem and Edgar who were finishing up world war three all packed up nice and tight in the bow of this stylishly hot ride that’s fate was to become a high speed fuck of destruction. “Do you guys feel WEIRD?” I asked. FUCK! What a goddamn question given the clusterfuckery at hand, but they did; both reports matched my own experience and we had to surmise that it was the ass-fucked new acid we were all fucked and tripping balls on. Ah, fuck it! We’d all been overdrugged before, and on a lot more intense fuckery than just demon-dipped hallucinogens. We’d taken drugs right out of the devil’s own hands for fuck’s sake, we’d prepared the shit out of this caper, things were in place, maneuvers were maneuvering, and we had some fucking donkeys to blow up.

I eased the boat up alongside the barge and there they were, bigger and more bloated than ever and still munching away at the hand-delivered pile of dump food we’d left them with. It was then that we discovered that the fucking space acid had a really fucked and useless side effect: short-term memory loss, so much so as for me to witness Dem light his cigarette fourteen times in a row, at which point I actually had to fucking stop him. All we had to fucking do was tie the barge to the goddamn boat, which was Edgar’s job; I was busy holding the boat and Dem was working on his configuration of explosives for when we scuttled that fucking cruise ship. But instead of doing his job, Edgar was talking to the fucking donkeys, and Dem was about to fucking gut his sorry retarded ass with a fucking meat cleaver before I intervened just in time and clocked him with the butt of a snubnosed revolver I’d picked up off the floor of the Lamborghini. Knocked somewhat to his senses, Dem stepped back and Edgar finally got on with the business of tying the barge to our boat.

We were all set to pull out, and with a collection of our calculations, we surmised that we had anywhere between thirty minutes and five hours to pulls this little caper off, so averaged out, we shouldn’t have any problems as far as time went. However, as we cruised off into the bay, I could tell that the barge and the boat weren’t getting along at all, those fucking donkeys were freaking the fuck out, and the barge was a living goddamn time-bomb and if it went off, so would we! So, we convinced Edgar to swim over and calm those goddamn beasts the fuck down. Dem gave him a stash of army surplus prefilled morphine spikes to jab the worst of them with. I hoped we didn’t fucking lose any to the bay, which was jam-fuck filled with huge motherfucking man-eaters, and one bite from them would be enough to trigger an explosion knocking the barge over capsized, donkeys sinking into the mouths of leviathan predators. Not only that, but one little bump from one of those big bastards down below could sink us all straight to hell. Watching Edgar swim to the barge, I realized he may not be completely entrusted with this knowledge of the bay’s deeper denizens, in regards to sheer number of man-eating squids, sharks, etc populating its waters. Fuck me! Something tells me we’ve gotta move. Edgar was safely aboard the barge and stabbing the freaked-out donkeys with morphine, Dem’s bomb all set up was ready to blow, and despite all the blue and pink-fanged teddy bears presently fucking each other on the boat’s dash, all was truly good in the hood.

By some miracle, we finally arrived at the site of the wreck, without a single helicopter in sight. The donkeys were overjoyed to be on solid ground once again, but something told me they’d reconsider their jubilations if they knew just what they had in store. Quickly herding them into the yawning hole in the ship’s busted hull, it wasn’t long before we’d made our way back to the cargo hold full of smack. Almost as if he were seeing it for the first time, it blew Edgar’s mind when he saw the sheer amount of smack packed in that huge compartment. Edgar and I were going to bring the donkeys down some steps to the smack level and Dem was going to rig the explosives around the designated donkey zone, thus creating a singularly timed blast that would leave no trace of anything but another gapping fucking hole in the hull.

Now, this was the really fucking fucked part of our plan: we’d rigged the Miami Vice boat to blow in case this mission got shit-fucked, and so far there’d been no shit-fucking, so in all reality, we could just remove the explosives from our boat, bring them in, adding a little more zest to the up and coming fuckery, and load our boat with EVEN MORE fucking smack than we’d even planned to carry, but our decision-making skills were sorely lacking by this point and we were hallucinating like madmen. I myself just couldn’t shake the fucking fanged teddy bears from my vision, and no one even thought to bring a fucking watch.

We obviously couldn’t handle this situation in the state we were in; that was the only clear piece of information we could fucking agree upon between us. I was so fucking confused by this point I’d agree to just about anything that would end this impending doom of clusterfucking madness. By and by, we decided to leave the explosives right where they were; time was a pressing factor and the set up on the Miami Vice boat was going to take at least fifteen minutes to two hours to dismantle and bring aboard, and besides, fucking around with Dem’s custom Christmas tree of wires and bombs and shit would most likely lead to even more clusterfuckery, being that we were all still tripping big balls of hallucinatory brain seizures and fuck. So, we left the ship with what we could carry, finally waving goodbye to our donkey-bombs for good, thank fuck, those fucking things had been fucking plaguing me with their uncertain but inevitable explosiveness all bloody goddamn day. We loaded up our boat with a substantial amount of booty and took the fuck off at hyper-speeds directed directly in the direction of the dump to offload.

Still, we had a donkey-ridden, smack-filled, atrophied cruise ship to sink with a precise explosion at a predetermined spot just above the waterline, which Dem had thoughtfully marked ahead of time with a big ass sharpie. Hitting the spot dead on would set off the whole fucking works Armageddon style. Safely back to our beach, all that was left to do was set the fucking auto-pilot, well that and first setting up some stolen lounge chairs from the hotel, pouring drinks, banging junk, and bumping PCP. Then, the button was finally pressed. We all just kicked back andwatched as our self-controlled mega-bomb blasted off into the distance. All of us had trepidation literally oozing from our slack mouths as we watched it go, hoping to hell we didn’t somehow manage to fuck the whole thing up after all. Also we took a somber moment to lament for the poor donkeys and their contribution to this insane fuckery they never saw coming when they ate all those dildos and other essentially  inedible items before.

Our timing proved perfect: just as the morning’s magic light began to blanket the island once more, the fucking cruise ship blew sky high, like the devil himself shot a giant fire-fart straight out of hell manifesting into a monstrous mushroom cloud disseminating everything outwards into indiscernible donkey particles, smack smoke and boat bits. It was so fucking beautiful we were all driven to tears.

We could even feel tiny fragments of ash floating down upon us as the tide moved in; it looked like the first snowfall of winter with clean white flakes of the purest fuckery piling up on the beach and in the dump. Despite the relief and overwhelming satisfaction that all this fuckery hadn’t gone completely fucking sideways as ultimately expected, I was forced to acknowledge that the fuckery bar had now been raised infinitely fucking higher.

That wrath of god explosion had been large enough to decimate a small moon; it was sheer gloriousness in its most finest of moments, a new artistic genre of fuckery, C4 and gaseous farm animals, which none but us possessed the pure corrupted drug-ridden thought processes and total disregard for human life, or other, to even conceive of such a spectacular abomination. In celebration, we opened another bottle of rum and dipped into a few more tabs of that new acid, hoping for a more serene trip without all that fucking around; but there was still one question rolling around in my head, given the clusterfuckingly fuck-ass shit show that had just unfolded and was now rapidly vanishing into the past:

What kind of outrageous FUCKERY would we pull next?

***

Dead Dog Day, Part 1
Dead Dog Day, Part 2
Dead Dog Day, Part 3
Dead Dog Day, Part 4
Dead Dog Day, Part 5

Dead Dog Day, Part 4

Abruptly I sat up from my bed of log and rock, and judging by the sun’s position in the sky, it was fucking hot out already. For the actual time, I’d have to dig my arm out of some shit it was buried in to check my watch first. The donkeys seemed to have finished all the monstrous dildos and had moved on to the dump itself. I couldn’t believe they weren’t dead by now, I mean, how do you even shit that stuff out? Maybe I was watching a truly abominable buildup of rubber and silicone, not to mention whatever else they’d already ingested from the dump. There were goddamn cars in there, fucking toxic waste, things that were dead and dying, and shit, actual shit that was on the threshold of becoming explosive. These motherfucking donkeys were going to blow up Loony Tunes style, but a lot more on the macabre side of fuckery; there’d be guts and entrails, blood, brains and bones, shards of fucking bones shooting every which way, like a giant gaseous grenade of bursting stomach and flying organs. These motherfuckers were going to fucking kill somebody and it sure as shit wouldn’t be me; we’ve got to kill these fucking beasts before it’s fucking too late!

I was totally freaking out when I went to find Dem who was sleeping on a pile of garbage; nothing really discernible, just everyday fucking junk. Well, I freaked the fuck out of him waking him up, and standing over him spouting out my freaky story really freaked him the fuck out even more, so he nearly took my head off, having a real freaky habit of sleeping with a goddamn snub-nose revolver, which freaked the fuck out of me on top of all the fucking freakiness I was already freaking out about at the moment.

With the two of us now in a totally freaked-out state of existence, all hell was busting loose inside our mistreated and self-butchered brains; I grabbed my emergency recreational dope-loaded first aid kit, and after a couple of bumps and bangs, we both settled the fuck down. Dem was sympathetic to my worries concerning the donkeys; he didn’t know fuck about the gastral intestinal physics of donkeys, but if there was a chance that these fucking things were going to explode from the inside out, something had to be done. The last thing we needed was a total exposé of exploding farm animals attracting everyone to the very spot of our newly acquired goddamn buried booty.

Dem pulled out his glamorously designed and motherfucking devastatingly apocalyptic Desert Eagle handgun, which could by all accounts take down a fucking tank, and we headed up the dump trail and over to what seemed to be the most bloated donkey of the group. Dem surmised that if we could blow a hole in its side, we could release the ever-mounting buildup of gas and thus avoid all danger of the fucking beast becoming a piñata loaded with dildo grenades later on. I knew Dem was dying to kill something, and a donkey wasn’t the first on his list, but at least he’d get a bit of a warm fuzzy feeling and more of a cooled-off intensity that would lessen his homicidal demeanor for a few hours at least. Me, I had no sentimentality regarding these fucked-up donkeys, I just didn’t want bones and brains strewn about the beach and any possible projectiles penetrating my goddamn forehead. At this point, protecting our motherlode of buried smack was the only concern on my mind.

We approached the donkey in question, and sure as shit it was fucking huge, its monstrous belly only a few inches from the ground. It was munching on oiled-up car parts and candy wrappers and was definitely the fucking beast of the bunch. We stood back a few meters and Dem chambered a bullet into the barrel of that monstrosity he was holding in his hands. He took the shot and the result was even worse than I’d imagined. I’d never seen the kind of macabre clusterfuckery I witnessed in that evil moment. I was right about the donkeys but had no idea that we could pre-explode the fuckers. It was a goddamn nightmare, a bad acid trip without the acid. Dem and I were blown back about ten meters  from the blast, completely covered in everything that had been inside that motherfucking wretched beast. The stink itself could’ve killed a man on its own. In addition, we’d both gone deaf from the concentrated combustion in that single walloping burst; it all looked like a slasher film gone fucking sideways. Dem caught a rib in the leg and, through some unlucky bastardized fuckery of physics, the donkey’s head landed right on top of mine. Stunned to fuck, we both started swatting the larger chunks donkey anatomy off of us. I’d never seen such catastrophic carnage before; the whole beach was covered in a blanket of blood and little fucking donkey chunks, and there was a hole the size of a goddamn Buick where the donkey once stood, who more than likely didn’t expect its day would fall short so abruptly.

Jesus motherfucking fuck! This was a goddamn grandiose ten-star clusterfuck straight out of hell! How the fuck were we gonna figure a way out of all this fuckery? I’d never heard of any domesticated animal, or any other type, blowing the fuck up like that. Are they all gonna go the same way? Are we going to have to drag them off into the fucking jungle and put a cap in all their guts? Someone must have heard that explosion, man. Christ, I was covered in blood and donkey insides; an explanation didn’t really seem conceivable at that point, and where the fuck was that goddamn Edgar? We had a real problem on our hands, those fucking explosive donkeys were going to hang around until they finished with the dump and another one could go off at any moment. We couldn’t move the stash with a big “We’re blowing up fucking donkeys!” sign that we were most definitely going to be fucking hanging up once the next one went off. Shit! Things just escalated from fucking fucked up to full-on goddamn clusterfuckery.

Meanwhile, coming up the beach were three “Suits” and a man who looked like Mac; what the fuck was all this about? Dem went directly into hiding, leaving me alone, blood soaked from head to toe, and covered in goddamn donkey guts, not to mention, rightly stoned and a little too pissed off to bother engaging in a conversation with douchebags, whoever the fuck they were. Everyone pretended to ignore the obvious carnal circus behind me, and aside from Mac, who had a horrified look on his mug, no one said a thing about the state of my attire, although one of the Suits wretched all over his patent leather shoes. Mac pulled me aside and explained the situation.

After hearing what I heard, a warm fuzzy shot straight through me; I felt like hippies must feel skipping through endless fields of marijuana. I was actually experiencing some kind of fucked-up divine synchronistic goddamn intervention. The Suits were from Ocean Falls, and they really didn’t want to deal with this shit-fuck they had; they were right fucked on this one man and they needed it to disappear quick, at any expense. At this point Dem conveniently reappeared, quite enthusiastic about the conversation he’d already been already listening to. Witnessing Dem’s own macabre collection of donkey parts and blood, another Suit wretched all over his shoes. Anyway, they wanted the ship blown apart wrath of god style. If this shit got out, a huge clusterfuck of even worse shit would follow. They had twenty-one ships at sea, all packed to the roof with smack, and if any one of them gets stopped a cascade of motherfucking epic proportions would manifest into a specially made maximum-security prison built just for fucking Ocean Falls employees. We decided on a fee and funnily enough at that moment, reassured them that we were fully capable of providing the adequate amount of munitions to take on a project this size. Aside from that, we could load up on more fucking smack at the same goddamn time, but how the fuck were we going to ship twelve, sorry, eleven fucking donkeys over to that ship? Too bad I crashed the hell out of that fucking boat we had last night, but even still, these boats were just fucking pleasure cruisers and sailboats, nothing that could handle a small herd of fucking animals onboard that were the goddamn size of our combustible donkeys. It was then that Dem reminded me about the old barge, rusted all to shit, half in the water and half tangled up in the jungle. It was big enough for sure, and we’d still have to steal a fucking boat to tow the fucking thing, but if it floated, which was pretty fucking improbable, we could be in real fucking business.

Realistically though, nothing could happen until after dark, so Dem zipped off back into the jungle for the time being. Convinced I could no longer hold back nature and the fuckery of possibilities it had handed us today, I tried to flag down some monkeys to wheelbarrow my bloody ass up to the cantina, but I suppose my ensemble of various donkey parts scared the fuckers off. So, I staggered my own ass into town, and along the way I couldn’t help but notice that the population had been upped by the presence of a lot of douchebag tourists roaming about. What fucking hole did they claw their asses out of all of a sudden? I reached the cantina pissed off to all fuck, looking like a goddamn macabre sideshow. I had to get this donkey shit off of me ASAP.

I went in to grab the keys to my room. The owner was bartending with a few servers running drinks to handle the overflow. The place was stock full of herded-up ass-fuck tourists. I quickly grabbed my keys, but not without hearing the most obvious question about what in the fucking hell happened to you? Which I answered with a gesture to indicate a story for another time. More pressingly, I wanted to know what was with the army of douchebags crowding up the streets. The owner explained that the word was they were going to move that ship in the morning, and out of liable constrictions and the safety of its passengers, it had to be evacuated. Fuck me! We’d had no clue in hell that ship had been so full of fuckers last night; there wasn’t so much as a peep or a creek during our whole entire heist. The owner also mentioned Edgar, who was sitting somewhere in the back, trembling with a look that evidenced seeing the devil himself. Judging by the familiar goop he was covered in, the owner surmised that he got his fucking retarded ass stuck in a carnivorous plant again for far too long. Edgar was prone to sleep-walking, especially when he was fucked on hallucinogens, which fortunately or unfortunately was his favorite form of bent-up fucked reality, and it was virtuously impossible not to run into a fucking man-eating plant when traversing the jungle, even dead sober. This was why a hand grenade was an integral part of all the islander’s travel kits; if you ever got yourself swallowed, as everyone did at some point, you’d jam that fucking thing down its guts as far as fucking possible and pull the fucking pin. If the blast didn’t kill you, which was an obviously possible consequence, you’d find yourself up in a tree and covered in goop instead, eventually dropping to the jungle floor. I couldn’t count the number of times Dem and I had to pry that fuck out of one of those fucking things, and it was a hell of a lot more difficult from the outside. One time, Dem loaded up the base of a plant with enough C4 to take out a fucking tank. I don’t think Edgar was ever really the same after that, nor was the half kilometer radius of jungle decimated from the blast.

Meanwhile, I decided to avoid Edgar like the plague; I was too pissed off and tired of sporting this blood-soaked carnage, and if I had to listen to his trepidatious ramblings, I’d be forced to squeeze a goddamn knot in his fucking ass. So, I climbed those stairs and fell onto my bed. There’d be no sleep for this poor fucker, though; I was still full up with a witch’s pharmacy, and if someone had done a blood test, I’m sure the diagnosis would be that I was already fucking dead. Looking over to my side, I could see that my rats had managed to get loose and open the bottle of PCP. They were all snout-deep in the stuff. I hadn’t a clue how much they’d done and how long they’ve been at it, thinking better off leaving them be for now; they could be useful later if they didn’t fucking overdose and keel over belly up.

It took about two goddamn hours to scrub all those donkeys guts, hides, various membranes and indiscernible chunks of organs or some shit off of me, but after I lit the offal-encrusted clothes I’d been wearing on fire and tossed them out the window, all evidence of the fucking donkey explosion was now in the past, aside of course for the blood-soaked beach we’d left behind. Prompted by a surprise outburst of horrified screams coming from below my window, I went over to investigate and saw that my burning fatigues had set a fucking tourist on fire. Jesus fuck man, I fucking hated tourists! The stupid cunt was rolling around in the dirt with who I guessed was his wife, both of them screaming like banshees for help. Ah fuck it, his problem now, I just hoped I hadn’t left any grenades my pants.

The Corpses Cantina was bursting with cunts and douchebag tourists; they were an impatient mob of super-cocksucking vampires all pissed off at their clusterfucked-up ship cruise getting fucked completely sideways. I noticed Dem by our usual stools, and I have to say, he was looking quite dapper this afternoon, probably burnt his own clothes as well. I’d guessed the rest of his jungle fucking mercenary shit must’ve been in the wash, because today he looked like he was on safari, sporting some kind of goddamn Australian fucking outback hat. He just sat there tossing little homemade sticks of dynamite out into the street, as was his usual pastime during any tourist season. He told me he took off a cunt’s toe earlier that day.

Fucking fuck me! The kind of wretched evil clusterfuckery we three were supposed to handle tonight was desperately in danger of all falling to shit; I didn’t even want to see Edgar, who was turning into a completely useless fucking cunt. Not only that, but I could tell Dem had been banging our new smack all fucking day long; not that I hadn’t been also, but I also wasn’t throwing dynamite into the fucking street, my rats weren’t going to be very useful after getting into all that goddamn PCP, and sooner or later they’d find a way out of that room and get medieval all over some unsuspecting tourist, fuck! What a potential fucking massacre. The donkeys were in danger of exploding any time now, and we’d be bloody well cunt-fucked as far as our job was concerned. We had to get that cocksucking barge floating, and we’d have to do it now, yes, NOW, in the goddamn daylight, and we hadn’t the slightest fucking clue as to the nature of that whole fucking exercise. It wasn’t a simple “we’ll deal with it later” fucking goddamn operation; the fucking barge was big and heavy and stuck there for as long as we assholes have been on the fucking island, maybe there was a good fucking reason that it was a goddamn fucked-up half-sunk nautical monument. Dem and I decided to check it out anyway, running into Edgar on our way out the back. He was in absolutely no shape to even wrap a simple discernible conversation around his hollow head, fucking twitching and retching all over himself, it was like he was goddamn possessed by the devil of total vacancy. We left him where he sat, still all covered in plant goop, and making not one bit of fucking sense. Best thing for him really, as the cantina takes good care of its regulars.

Dem and I speed away in the partially totalled but still fucking unbelievably ferocious Lamborghini. The “road” went all the way around the bay and would hopefully take us close to that motherfucking huge hunk of fucking vintage metal that we were so desperately in need of. Soon we stopped at a spot we both agreed upon near the fucking jungle; we’d have to traverse some wretchedly entangled vines and tree branches, not to mention poisonous every-fucking-things, an ass-load of carnivorous plants, and all we knew nothing about that could probably fucking kill us, before we came out at the edge of the water where hopefully we’d find our fucking barge. We made it pretty much unscathed aside from Dem getting his leg half swallowed by a particularly beautifully colored carnivorous plant with nuances of purple and pink and shades of blue, or at least it was before Dem retaliated with his AK47. Then it was mush, and Dem’s leg was just fucking fine.

Then we hit pay-dirt. There was the barge, all rusted out and tangled up in the jungle, but it really didn’t seem as bad from this view point; the hull was fucking totally intact and it wasn’t as submerged as we’d previously thought. It seemed that releasing it from its jungle snare was the only fucking hardship we’d have to endure. This wasn’t going to be your regular boy scout primitive machete-wielding work-horse type of job either; Dem was always, and I mean fucking always prepared to blow shit right the fuck up. As I watched him carefully place and wire the explosives, I couldn’t help but take account of his finesse and determined concentration; he was a champion in his field, a fucking poet of destruction and mayhem and completely in his element; too bad he was so homicidally insane. It took Dem a little while to rig everything up, but soon enough we were all set to blow. He’d set things so the sound from the explosion would travel inward into the fucking jungle, as opposed to out across the bay, in which case we’d be heard by the whole motherfucking island. We picked a nice big motherfucker of a tree to cower behind, and as Dem pulled the fucking switch, two incredibly beneficial divine inter-fucking-ventions occurred: the first being that the barge was totally fucking freed, and fucking well floated, the second being that the blast as Dem said blew straight through the jungle and cleared the whole way back to the fucking car.

After camouflaging the barge, Dem and I went back to the car, which in all our recollections had been a hard top when we first fucking arrived. Still, we weren’t too concerned about an abrupt little remodeling; the car had already been smashed to shit in the first place, and whizzing down that road convertible style didn’t sound so bad either. On out way back to the dump, Dem and I began to do as much and as many varieties of fucking drugs as we could. Man, we were right fucked out of our minds and at fucking velocities extremely ill-advised, but I had this theory that if we went foot to the floor, we’d just sort of float over all the gaping holes in the road; this however didn’t the matter of all the fallen trees lying in the middle of the fucking road, but I could only handle one epiphany at a time.

We came screaming around from behind the dump, all four wheels still attached and the new sunroof really opened things up; Mac was gonna shoot us both for this fuckery. So, who knew how to deal with the goddamn donkeys? Nobody? Great! Both of us were completely dumbfounded. Dem thought I knew some shit about them, being in such close proximity to the fucking things for a while, but I knew fucking shit, all I did was fucking yell at the cocksuckers. We figured if we just tied a rope around their fucking necks and led them down the road caravan style, they’d just follow along, easy as shit right? Nope, big time clusterfuck; they were running all over the dump and they looked frighteningly larger than they had before. We had to use some real fucking finesse wrangling those donkey-bombs or sure as shit one of ’em was gonna blow, and we’d already been through that kind of goddamn catastrophe earlier, one neither of us wanted to repeat. We were using one long climbing rope that Dem had; I could never believe the amount of shit he could fucking carry, it was like a magical bottomless duffle bag that held anything explosive or anything that contributed to everything explosive with wiring, knives, handguns, flash-bombs and probably a fucking magic rabbit as well, although I’d never seen it but I bet that it could blow up, too.

Apparently, finesse wasn’t in the cards for us during Operation Donkey Fuck; it was more of a screaming and cussing and scurrying around the dump kind of affair. We ran ourselves ragged chasing those motherfuckers, managing to tie ourselves up in the goddamn rope a few times ourselves. After about a half hour of this horseshit, the fucking donkeys finally seemed to tire put and settle back down a bit. Fuck, it was fucking amazing that they could even move in the first place, carrying so much indigestible shit in their fucking guts, but that was it, we’d outlasted the cunts. Dem and I bumped a massive bump and ran those fucking donkeys to the ground. All nice and docil,e the herd just kind of lined itself up, it was total submission. We tied them up two by two with number eleven bringing up the rear; our scrapes and bruises and debris-covered countenances in no way took away from the satisfaction of finally harnessing these goddamn ultimately doomed creatures. We tied the fucking lot of ’em to the ass end of the Lamborghini; it all kind of looked like Santa’s fucking sleigh but ass-backwards and no fucking toy deliveries, this lot was ready to blow! We cruised slowly back down the road, careful not to yank those cunts too hard, as we were still in danger of having an unfortunately premature explosion and with the herd so closely harnessed, we could be looking at a chain reaction clusterfuck unseen by man since biblical times. We’d loaded up an old decrepit trailer full of dump shit to bring along to keep the donkeys eating, busy and distracted until our devious ill-advised caper was afoot. Judging from our observations, that included many mangled car parts and other rusted to shit machinery, moldy magazines and newspapers of all varieties, any dead or dying vermin, vomit, shit, and rotten fruit, along with armfuls of other miscellaneous shit we’d just randomly grabbed for them to eat.

We must have looked like a real fucking sideshow moving down that road at about 4 MPH in a smashed to shit Lamborghini with eleven hippy-painted donkeys in tow. After Dem  finally passed out, machinegun still in hand, the long slow ride seemed to bring on the air of contemplative introspection, fueled of course by the copious varieties of recreational drugs that fucked up most of my fucking cognitive abilities. Along the way back to the barge, I astral-fucking-planed my ass back about six years to when I first set foot on this fucking wretched piece of sinister shit island; I was writing for some shit vacation magazine, the bottom fucking rung for any aging writer. I was supposed to be on my way to Cuba, but I couldn’t give a horses ass where I fucking ended up. I was stinking on rum day and night, which by all accounts was my main nutritional supplement at the time. So, after getting off at the wrong island, I’d staggered onto what looked to be the main drag and into the local establishment that would serve as the planning grounds for much of the homicidal debauchery and wretched fuckery I’d get up to in the years to come. The Corpses Cantina, that’s when I first met Dem. He almost took my goddamn arm off with one of those little sticks of dynamite that day, but we became friends immediately thereafter.

Back in present time, I clocked Dem on the side of his head with the butt of one of the many revolvers strewn around the car. “Wake up motherfucker, we’re on donkey duty again!” He woke up as instructed but with a very unpleasant grimace; you could tell that his drug combo had been selected a bit too haphazardly, so I took out my kit and fixed the both of us right up. We expected this endeavor to be rigorously fucked with lots of goddamn heavy lifting and a continuous cascade of fuckery popping up at every step, but as it turns out, after untying the herd from the car, we were able to simply guide those cunts down through the explosively groomed section of jungle, all the way down to the barge, which to our amazement was still fucking afloat.

Meanwhile, we were coming down off the cocaine; that shit was as useless as fuck, more suited for college cunts and tourists with their little bumps at parties and stress-filled exam weeks. Us, we’ve ascended far above the level of constant bumping every twenty minutes; we just didn’t have the time anymore. At the top of our list was PCP, which was long lasting and it would get you right fucking fucked and was a true wretched friend on more than a few of our sinister clusterfuckeries and ruthlessly illegal misadventures, along with a careful nuance of hallucinogens and a consistent pace of slugged down of rum, we could really truly ascend to the ferociously vicious fuckery required to pull off some really fucked-up shit, which was the fucking case here.

We unharnessed the parade of fucking donkeys, who’d remained submissive the whole time, thank fuck! Then we loaded our collection of dump shit / a.k.a. donkey chow onto the barge the barge’s deck in an attempt to lure them aboard, like a carrot dangling before them, seeing as how they’d probably never been off of dry land before. When that didn’t work, we tried just pushing and shoving and kicking those damned donkey fucks onto the goddamn barge. I definitely felt their trepidation and horror, and apparently so did Dem, as he began setting off flash-grenades behind the bunch, scaring the living fuck out of the donkeys and me as well. This however did the trick, and the donkeys fucked off right onto that barge immediately, shitting themselves along the way. I guess sometimes you’ve just gotta pull your resources.

We still had some daylight to burn, so we left our donkey floating and cruised back down to the cantina; we couldn’t do anything until after fucking dark anyway, and I used this time to try and explain the importance of Dem keeping his motherfucking dynamite in his goddamn bag once we arrived. Today of all days, we bloody well had to keep a low fucking profile, and all we fucking needed was an amputated tourist spouting blood all over the goddamn place to attract unwanted attention. Also, we were damned dirty; not wrath of fucking god exploded donkey dirty, thank fuck, but dirty all the same. Dump dirty, handling car parts dirty, donkey hippy paint job dirty shit, so I let Dem upstairs to clean up and borrow some clothes. We also had a fuck load of lacerations and shards of metal sticking out of us, so we had to spend a few minutes plucking that dump shit out of ourselves and pouring paint thinner on the wounds, this being the only disinfectant I had aside from the rum, which was way too valuable and ill-advised for such a waste. The pharmacy had to remain topped off at all times, meaning if we ran out of anything, I mean any-goddamn-thing during our little caper, the shit knot would squeeze and all would certainly fall to shit. FUCK! I needed a fucking drink…

When I came back downstairs, Dem was already at his regular stool, facing the street from the end of the bar. There was some douchebag tourist at my regular stool, but after Dem’s discrete flash of his extremely decorative Desert Eagle, the fuckhead was soon completely out of sight. I checked my bag of angry rats and they seemed to be doing alright, but I could tell they were tripping balls big time; they’d cleaned up the last of their PCP and were now munching on actual food brought out with compliments of the establishment. Compliments my ass. It’s not that it wasn’t appreciated, it’s just that the rats were infamous for their abominable bloody atrocities, and nobody wanted a piece of that homicidal fuckery. Anyway, the rats could rest well after their feast; we weren’t going to need them on this little extravaganza, but we probably could’ve used Edgar, depending of course on his own level of usefulness at the time. And there he was, sipping cocktails right where we left him, although it was obvious he’d been home and back again, judging by the thoroughly hosed-off fucking plant goop and a clean shave to boot.

“Are you up for some dastardly ill-advised buffoonery later on tonight?” I asked. “We can’t fucking have you all fucking fucked-up on this fucking one for fuck’s sake!”

His reassurances fell on deaf ears, as we both knew he’d find some way to screw the pooch, all sodomy and fireworks style, but we needed another pair of hands and there was no way getting around that shit. We filled him in on the clusterfuck donkey demolition fuckery plan and went back to our stools to watch the tourists frolic on the strip. I could tell that Dem was just dying to toss some dynamite at them, but he kept his composure and waited it out. We still had about six hours until sundown, and six hours gave us plenty of time to kill with cocktails and a king’s ransom’s worth of PCP.

***

Dead Dog Day, Part 1
Dead Dog Day, Part 2
Dead Dog Day, Part 3
Dead Dog Day, Part 4
Dead Dog Day, Part 5

Dead Dog Day, Part 3

I was glad to see that the donkeys were okay, but pissed like fuck at the fact that they were still fucking there, and they’d better not have got into my goddamn stash. The tide had apparently come in again and washed all those abominable dildos out to sea, thank fuck, at least there’s one thing I won’t get fucking arrested for. Hey, wait, there’s no tide at this time of the day… I took a look over at the donkeys and noticed that they were eating all the goddamn dildos; this can’t be fucking good at all! I know some people say that a donkey can eat anything but Jesus fuck man, we’re talking rubber and silicone, some with electric parts, batteries etc. These goddamn things are going to fucking DIE from some sort of very vicious excruciating form of indigestion, and worst of all they’re most likely going to die right fucking here on my “property.”

I scrambled for my shit, grabbed my bag and called out to the rats, who were presently scattered out over the beach. They converged like greased lightning upon my location, knowing they’d be rewarded with a little bump of PCP later. Gathering them all up, I swung my bag of angry rats over my shoulder and picked up an overstuffed suitcase carrying copious amounts of drugs, drug paraphernalia, a few bottles of rum, cigarettes, a few side arms and some hand grenades.

I paid a bunch of monkeys to carry me in a wheelbarrow up to The Corpses Cantina. There was no way I’d make it in my fucked-up disoriented condition, with my rubbery legs and hallucinations of flying fanged teddy bears. I had a room upstairs, a safe house of sorts, just in case any shit went down back at the shack. I’d learned it was essential to always have a plan B on this island after the first time I drove a stolen boat into the fucking shack. The place had been crawling with islanders, all there to watch the shit show at the mouth of the bay. I wondered how many of them realized the kind of wretched fuckery and blasphemy-spouting, bleached flour type of god-fearing assholes that would be the horrific manifest consequence of the giant shithole we were all about to be sucked into, and what was later to come.

I grabbed my keys and crawled upstairs to my hideaway. Starting with a few bumps, I followed with my ablutions and some clean clothes; it was definitely a fatigue day if there ever was one. Next, I armed myself like a goddamn mercenary and filled my pockets with as much PCP, coke, crack, smack, uppers, downers, acid and cigarettes as I could fit into my cargo pockets, making sure to save some space for a few grenades as well. My preparations finally complete, I slung my bag of angry rats over my shoulder and went down to the cantina to check out the vibe.

First thing walking in, I spotted Dem and Captain Edgar propped up on their usual stools; they both still looked and smelt like something had just shit them out. Edgar was sauced up real good but Dem had a devious fucking look to him, like you could see the gears turning inside his head through his eyes. I asked him what kind of dangerously ill-advised drug-guided fuckery he obviously already had his paws in was going down; I knew he’d been in the jungle all afternoon, I knew he was in with the guerrillas, and I knew that both he and the guerrillas were very well armed and usually stinking on peyote, so there had to be something in the works that concerned big-ass fucking explosions and a lot of massacring, blood, and gruesome ungodly death. All he said was that everything was ready and in place, which basically meant that we were going to have ourselves a nice little fucking war on our hands any minute. As a momentary alternative to full-on slaughter, I proposed a trip up to see Mac and find out how he was handling this clusterfuck. Dem agreed and Edgar, who had somehow once more put himself into another state of vegetative oblivion, agreed as well. He indicated as much by emitting a garbled yelp, like that of a dying animal, before immediately vomiting all over his shirt.

We went out back of the cantina to hose Edgar off and grab Mac’s Lamborghini. There was a kind of what some may call a road that ran behind the strip and up to Mac’s place. We’d stolen the car a few weeks before and completely fucking forgot about it. Mac was usually a pretty chilled-out character, but when it came to his cars, he was a ferocious motherfucker with no qualms about shooting the shit out of anybody who fucked with them. Ergo, returning the car would be a precarious affair, but we hoped it wouldn’t supersede the fuckery and mayhem of the present moment. Edgar we tied to the roof, as there was no room in the car, and another vomiting session would completely fuck the interior. Dem wanted both hands on his machinegun, so I was our chauffer, which, given my record at the wheel, was a completely insane decision. Still, off we went, and I could feel the undercarriage ripping to fucking shreds all the way up to Mac’s place. Who has a fucking Lamborghini on an island that only has roads to suit camels and horses or some shit?

Once we’d arrived, after cutting Edgar down, we saw nothing but hysteria everywhere. The Ocean Falls crew was there, the fucking Coast Guard, those bastard fucks, they seemed to be interrogating Mac, and Mac looked like a deer caught in the headlights, or rather like a deer on smack caught in the headlights. We had to get him away from those fucks and FAST, as the kind of questions he would be asked would be loaded up with suspicion and legal curiosities, the kind of questions a criminal didn’t want to answer. The whole fate of the island would stand on his creativity and abstract thought, neither of which he could claim to possess sober, much less stoned out of his fucking gourd. In fact, Mac was a bit of a fucking idiot; all his million dollar ventures were purely accidental and ill-gotten through people who were even fucking stupider than he was. We were all FUCKED, man; shit was not in control here AT ALL.

We waved over to Mac, who seemed vehemently ecstatic that we were there. We all gathered in his garage after he was successfully able to excuse himself from the fucking inquisitional bullshit he’d been subject to all day. He was scared shitless and fucked up beyond belief, but he was trying his best to keep up appearances, or at least one of his appearances; if they discovered who he really was, the shit was going to hit the proverbial fan big time. Luckily for us, he didn’t even notice the banged-up Lamborghini I’d crashed into the wall of the garage upon our arrival; he was a bit too bewildered and banged up himself due to the manifest clusterfucking arrival of the official douchebags who were presently inspecting his compound, poking their fucking cock-sucking noses into everything revealing of the kind of fuckery that made this island great.

“You got some fucking PCP?” Mac asked us with wild eyes. I tossed the bag over to him and he must have snorted half the stash. I know these were troublesome times but FUCK ME man, a man’s stash was sacred, and I was going to require a fully stocked medicine cabinet if I was gonna get through this macabre nightmare. I wasn’t planning on being sober for weeks, for fuck’s sake, and I was damn well determined to prevail against these outsider pricks.

Now it was time for the nitty-gritty. Mac had built a bomb shelter of sorts under the garage, so we opened up the trap door and went down the rickety stairs into some semi Persian-like monstrosity of a room, with carpets hanging from the walls and these godawful lamps everywhere with fake gems and fake gold designs; it was like some contemporary bad decision harem tent made of concrete and garbage. It DID have a fully stocked working beer fridge, however, which was what I headed for immediately. We all got comfy on the faux leather couches and got right fucked before the inevitably wretched conversation we were about to engage in.

“Okay Mac, what in all hell the fuck is going on?” I asked, knowing I would have to decipher the crazed drug-addled ramblings of this ancient idiot fuck, who’d been shooting smack since before people had cars, who’d most definitely been forced into coming up with lie after lie all goddamn day under extremely motherfucking stressful interrogations, and the most sinister of questioning.

After a long, rigorously exhausting, unenthusiastic brain mulching translation process, it basically came out as such: The big heads of the Ocean Falls company were on their way here, and apparently the boat on the rocks wasn’t their biggest worry. Unbeknownst to myself and our little cadre here, they’d been smuggling smack to every port of entry they could get to, FUCK! Those assholes must be shitting each other’s pants right about now. That would explain the overwhelming presence of those fucking Coast Guards; I bet that ship could carry a shit load of smack man, and I thought we’d be the ones who would get it. Fuck all his other ramblings about arrests being made, the Coast Guard up his ass and whatever fuckery was endangering the island; we were sitting on a goddamn goldmine of fucking smack! The Ocean Falls douchebags wouldn’t be here till morning, the crew of the ship was in Mac’s compound, as were most of the Coast Guard fucks, it was getting dark, and who but we three could pull off a scam like this? Everyone was in with outrageous enthusiasm. Mac of course would have to stay behind and keep the fucking dogs at bay, which he didn’t mind at this point, considering the bounty of fucking dope up for grabs.

The three of us had done all sorts of shit like this a thousand times before, but this one was a little fucking slippery. We’d rip off a boat, which was the easy part, but getting to the ship with those goddamn helicopters flying around would take some finesse, and in this case that meant jungle-warfare training, which luckily Dem had done years of. He had this fucking huge non-reflective tarp that when covering over the boat would make it almost invisible to the sweeping lights on the patrol choppers. Our main issue would be boarding the ship itself; there could be tons of Coast Guard official douches aboard, and they would have to be dealt with quick and quiet. Murdering an “Official” anything was a very precarious endeavor; it wasn’t like on the island where nobody really gives a fuck, people go missing all the fucking time, but if we had to pull off a full-fucking-fledged armed insurrection, we’d be bringing bodies back, which meant less smack and hauling corpses through the fucking jungle. Dem’s idea was a bit more civilized; if we did run into a clusterfuck, we’d murder the fucks, load the boat with smack, and set enough explosives to destroy any and all evidence and the ship with it; it was homicidal genius, but I knew Dem was dead set on taking out one of those choppers, which would basically fuck the whole plan to shit.

So the agenda was all agreed upon, which meant (in our case at least) there was no concrete plan of attack or specific strategy we would follow because we’d all just fuck it up anyway. We’d go step by step, right fucked on drugs and rum. Meanwhile, Mac was going to launch his catering team on the fuck knobs in the compound, which would keep them around for a while, loading the drinks with roofies and other barbiturates. Running like wild hyenas, we shot out of the secret underground tunnel and revved up the Lamborghini, which hadn’t been quite totaled yet. We had a little trouble tying Edgar to the roof this time, as he was more coherent and wouldn’t stop bitching, so Dem gave him a bolt across the nose that shut his ass up promptly. Then, after we picked up Dem’s tarp and a shitload of munitions, we parked the beast behind the cantina, almost forgetting poor Edgar until we heard him squealing and yelping still tied to the fucking roof. I thought about leaving him behind, but on a one-to-ten on the clusterfuck scale, we were all pretty much an eleven at this point, and besides, Edgar had always stood tall against the sinister and ferocious fuckery we’ve found ourselves in. It would also mean that I’d be pulling off this job with just Dem alone, and without that tri-fuckery of concentrated madness, things could go overwhelmingly fucking sideways.

We stayed for a few drinks at the cantina, quietly observing our objective at the mouth of the bay. As the sun sank behind the mountains, it was time. We all payed up and slithered on down to the docks. I noticed that Dem had a fucking shitload of stuff in his duffle bag and a hard, long case that was most obviously an RPG. This shit had started to look really fucking bad already, so I hung back and bumped about a day’s worth of PCP before catching up with the guys who were already perusing through our choice of boats. Dem found a nice one with lots of storage space and had already begun tossing the contents overboard. It was called the Saint Mary. Dem hated religious fuckholes.

We had a fuck of a time stretching that fucking tarp over that boat, complete and total buffoonery, we were all over the deck trying to tie the fucking thing down. I fell overboard and Edgar followed, but Dem pulled us back aboard. He was completely pissed and told us to sit the fuck down and stay out of his goddamn way. He managed to have the thing in place within five minutes, causing Edgar some mild embarrassment. I however was on enough PCP to put down an elephant, so I’d pretty much forgotten every fucking thing that had happened in the last half hour or so anyway.

The boat’s starter was another question. It was taking Dem some time to enable it. First he had to disarm the alarm system, which was touch and go for a bit. Just what we needed, I thought. I figured we’d fuck things up a little further on into our conquest, not right at its fucking outset. Finally, the engine sputtered to life and we eased away from the shore, cruising across the bay at low speed. It was dark out now, and we only had one chopper in the air to contend with, but the fucking lights on that thing were ominously foreboding. I sure hoped Dem knew what he was doing with this fucking tarp thing. Eventually our target emerged from the darkness before us, and from our position we could see no movement on its deck. We managed to cruise right up to the ship with no fucking trouble at all, and I definitely found a new respect for Dems Voodoo-military shit, but in all fucking reality we could have been really just goddamn fuck-lucky.

Believing all was clear, we three liquored-up, doped-out scavengers poured our asses out of the boat and onto some very untraversable fucking terrain, I mean goddamn frightening sharp and unruly rocks that probably took a pint of blood out of my already rickety half useless legs. We were close enough now that we could see the fucking damage we caused the night before, and it was un-fucking-believable, like the fucking hull had been completely torn out of the ship; it looked like one of those abominable giant sea monsters I sometimes hallucinate just came up and took a big motherfucking bite right out of it.

Crawling into one of the gaping holes in the wreckage, at that point I found myself being plagued by two questions: 1) Who brought a fucking flashlight? And 2) how in all fuck are we gonna find the fucking smack? Dem was ready with the lights, a couple of lanterns and a few of those long, heavy mag-lights that cops use to beat the fuck out of people with. Still, the exact location of the smack however was anybody’s guess. This ship was a goddamn cruise-liner, a pretty fucking small one in comparison to most, but it could take us all night tripping all over ourselves and we still might not find the shit. So, we put our heads together, which never really amounted to any useful strategies in the past, but as scary as that sounds, we tried our best. Edgar was vacant beyond all comprehension and my usefulness was tipping the scales, but Dem was dead set on checking the bilge. Everybody smuggles shit under the floor boards, he said, the only drawback would be the fact that that part of the boat was mostly under water. They sure as shit better have wrapped that smack up tight!

So we began our descent through some hallways and down some stairs until we reached the belly of the fucking beast; pipes and nobs, gauges and all else that could knock us in the head, we were surrounded by everything we knew nothing about. All we could do was follow Dem and hope the fuck he had some sense of where we were going. After crawling through row after row of what looked like some fucking type of purposeful machinery, we came out into an open space with a view of a perfect vista, a room the size of a football field STACKED full of motherfucking smack all wrapped in various-sized bundles of plastic wrap and packing tape. I guess the adrenalin must’ve kicked in some of the acid I’d been taking on an eight-hour regimen, because I began to hallucinate wildly, it was like the Wizard of Oz meets the Yellow Submarine, Edgar was the Tin-Man and Dem was a Blue Meany, but a really fucking fucked-up one with fangs and a pink dress with a little ducky pattern. The cargo hold of smack looked like that goddamn poppy field that Dorothy and all the other characters got doped-up in.

Dem came up and gave me a slap; he knew I was somewhere in outer-space, and we needed to start hauling the shit, now. That was a fucking bitch, and it took goddamn forever, we should have hired monkeys but we couldn’t trust fucking anyone at this point. Anyway, after about three grueling hours of backpacking bundles, we finally filled the boat over any reasonable capacity, sat down and shot the shit, and that shit was NO shit; it was pure and devastating shit. We fucking blew ourselves into oblivion and beyond, pure and unviolated like an un-sodomized Smurf; the stars were like laser-beams trailing from the acid and the smack seemed to comfort like a brand-new duvet made of fluffy clouds and the silken asses of a hundred voluptuous maidens. I was truly in outer-space now, but with another slap from Dem, I reentered our physical plain. It looked as though we weren’t going to capsize or blow up the works, the chopper was gone out of sight, and even though I could see that Dem was a little down about not killing anyone or knocking that helicopter out of the sky, we’d made a huge score, which truly delighted us all.

I eased the boat back in toward the dump, giving it a blast of turbo speed as we drew near; I wanted that thing in pieces and far enough onto the beach to mix with all the other wreckage. We’d have to bury this shit around the fucking dump, which meant another few hours of back-fucking-breaking, uncivilized, stunk-up dirt refuse bird-shitted biohazard manual digging. What I wouldn’t give for some goddamn heavy machinery right about now! But, we had to get this shit in the ground before daybreak, so with shovels in hand, we worked the rest of the night, and come sunrise, all was quietly and inconspicuously tucked away in a space no rational thinking douchebag would ever think to enter.

Our work completed, we all fell into heaps where we stood and passed out immediately. I slept on a log and a rock and it was the best sleep I’d ever had. I dreamt a frequently occurring dream, or rather a dream with consistently appearing characters; they were these really viciously ferocious baby blue and pink fucking teddy bears with jagged fangs and blood covering their mouths and dripping down all over their round teddy bear bellies. It was the most frightening macabre fuckery I’d ever imagined; sometimes it got so far as me watching them eat me and tear me apart and I couldn’t look away, I couldn’t close my eyes, motherfuckery, man. I mean JESUS FUCK, where the fuck does that shit even get shit out from? My mind is fucking doomed…

***

Dead Dog Day, Part 1
Dead Dog Day, Part 2
Dead Dog Day, Part 3
Dead Dog Day, Part 4
Dead Dog Day, Part 5

Dead Dog Day, Part 2

We’d only snoozed through our ferociously tormented wrath of god hangovers for a couple of hours when all sorts of clusterfucking fuckery began to manifest around us, and if I were to use the most convenient comparisons, I would say our combined usefulness was equivalent to that of a single fucking pineapple. The beach was still shit loaded with criminal paraphernalia and the goddamn donkeys seemed to have settled the fuck in. Where’d they fucking come from anyway? There’s got to be some fuck who has an odd problem with disappearing livestock, how can you not miss twelve fucking jackasses? And who were the hippy douchebags that had painted them all up like that? Goddamn fucks, I should find them, go ape-shit and slaughter their fucking asses, but who’s got time for that cleaver-wielding shit right now? We’ve got a semi-catastrophe about to unfold on our hands, so I’ve got to be on my game. Now, where’d I put that fucking PCP?

I staggered through the wreckage of what was once my home as the motherfucking tide came in. We were practically comatose and there was shit piled up everywhere, no canopy, no makeshift fucking bed, just piles of shit on piles of shit. I began to look around for my supplies, my drugs, my goddamn cigarettes, my fucking rum, I could barely walk, I was still hallucinating, and these fucking heaps of shit were almost completely untraversable. I cut myself about a thousand fucking times staggering through this insipid mountainous terrain, but I did at least manage to scrounge all of my recreational requirements after god knows how long it took. Opening one of my various containers, I immediately snorted the first thing I fucking saw, knowing I was going to do every fucking drug in there at some point anyway. I popped a few pills, opened a bottle of rum, and rolled a fucking gargantuan dube that would surely meet any and all Olympic qualifications and standards.

As I was puffing away, sitting on a nice pile of fucking wreckage, my thoughts turned to my lunatic amigos. I knew Dem was somewhere back in the jungle (his kind of fucked-up homicidal paranoia could make some physiatrist rich beyond their wildest dreams), armed to the teeth and on enough fucking drugs to put down a goddamn mammoth. Thank fuck he took a liking to me when we met, but he still fucking freaks the fuck out of me from time to time. I took several scans around this shit hole but I couldn’t see Captain Edgar anywhere, that is until I observed some scuffling going on below me, accompanied by these wretched whines and squeals. It was fucking him alright. Seems he hadn’t managed to escape the tide after all, becoming part of the wreckage itself. Although I didn’t feel like moving a whole lot, it was obvious that he was fucking stuck, and if I had to listen to his ruckus any longer I’d be forced to fucking kill the fuck. After about fifteen grueling fucking minutes of digging through boards, sea scum, and a disturbing collection of assorted refuse, we finally got him out of there.

I placed the fucker on a nice flat pile of wreckage across from where I was sitting. Now, before our little snooze, Edgar had been unintelligible and unresponsive. I believe that I’d assessed his state as his brain having been replaced with a jellyfish, and I was not in the mood for anybody’s motherfucking shit right now, not even (perhaps especially not) Edgar’s. I was fucked up on countless forms of intoxicants and coming down off of equally if not more forms of intoxication, so I wasn’t going to play fucking nursemaid to any fucking body. I did however find him some clothes and filled him up with pills; it was the least I could do.

As we inhaled the grass and sipped our brandy I began to notice that Edgar wasn’t retarded anymore. At least to the degree that he could form fucking sentences that were somewhat discernible, the fucker had made a breakthrough. I thought he had fucked himself permanently; turns out he may have come from a pirate lineage after all. He began to explain the wretched fuckery we were up to last night, which I had completely forgotten as the manifest of my insatiable drug-induced insanity washed all such recollections down the shitter. We crashed that boat; Edgar pointed out to the mouth of the bay, where the “Ocean Falls” cruise liner had run aground, and as far as I could tell there were more and more Coast Guard ships and helicopters circling around than there had been this morning, FUCKING FUCK! Edgar explained that the three of us had pirated the main bridge fucked out of our fucking minds on a lot of fucking acid, amongst various other things you could eat, smoke, shoot and shove up your ass.

Now normally, this sort of thing wasn’t much of an issue, as we knew most of the crews that came into port. We’d steal a boat and go party with them, it was a regular event, but this was a different sort of party, you know those parties where a hand grenade “accidentally” goes off in an enclosed espace with all sorts of important equipment around, well, this was one. Nobody had been hurt, as if we cared, but the entire helm was basically fucking totaled, and for those oblivious to nautical terminology, that meant no steering, or should I say steering where the boat wants to go. Within about seven minutes, the ship was on the rocks, and within another two, the three of us got the motherfucking hell out of there.

We hopped off the ship and into the water near our stolen boat. I was the most fucked up, so naturally I took the wheel, and I took that wheel at full fucking speed and aimed it directly for the beach my shack was on. Well, we made it to the beach my shack was on except the boat was now on top of the shack, or more accurately, A PART of the shack would be the more descriptive fucking imagery here.

After Edgar’s tale of our debauchery and mayhem satisfied me enough to fill in the rest of the blank spots myself, I told him to get fucked and fuck the hell off home to get straightened up and recover from his jellyfish fucked brain thing; I needed time alone to get fucked up on something soothing enough to think straight and view the dastardly goings on at the mouth of the bay. I had a pretty strong feeling that this dead dog day was about to fucking turn up even more fuckery than it already had.

I ventured out momentarily to rip off a lounge chair and one of those big goddamn fucking umbrellas from the hotel down the beach, but by the time I fucking got there, I’d already forgotten what the fuck I was there for, so I sat down on a lounge chair under an umbrella and ordered a drink instead. Despite the fact that I looked like something just shit me out, I had cash on me, which I tried to show to the waiter before he kicked my stunk-up dirty fucking ass out of there. I always carry money, if only for the purpose of being robbed and not having any dough to dish out, that really fucking pisses people off and robbing people is a really tough fucking gig! Then there’s ransom money, more commonly known as BAIL. It’s not an uncommon occurrence for me to land in jail, I have to say, and usually I haven’t a fucking clue as to how the fuck I got there, which would probably reference the kind of fuckery and monstrous amounts of drugs running through my cables that got me there in the first place. In any case, a few bills peels off to the right fuck will buy you a get-out-of-jail-free card every time.

I chain smoked my way through my thoughts and my cocktails, having one delivered every twenty minutes, full of PCP and tripping balls on a couple of tabs of acid which made me feel like fucking jelly or gummy bears or some shit. Why haven’t they cleared that goddamn boat yet? What’s with the fucking Coast Guard bringing in reinforcements, and what’s going on with this whole clusterfuckingly devious happening? I’d better not run out of fucking drugs or this shit show is going to manifest into a very sinister implosion inside my skull. I needed more intel, more information; I needed to find out who was in communication with these fucks and what they were fucking up to. If word got out about this fucking island, we’d all be arrested for one fucking thing or another; in my case: drugs, guns, theft, destruction of property, bestiality (the donkeys), cruelty to animals, my bag of angry rats and the paint on the donkeys, not to mention my numerous abominable wretched nights of fuckery that have become infamously retold again and again by the island’s inhabitants.

The minute this island gets on a fucking map, all hell will break loose; we’ll have two-weeker tourists rolling their fat all along the strip, people will be killed. We’ve got some really bad motherfuckers here that would prefer to be left the fuck alone, myself included. Some of those unlucky fucks will disappear either out of malice by some fucked-up evil blood-draining Voodoo rituals, or the more common misadventures such as the many varieties of insatiable carnivorous plants scattered around the island, ready to swallow your ass before you even knew your fucking ass was being swallowed. They take some poor fuck every two days, hence the importance of having a hand grenade on one’s person at all times.

There’s going to be investi-fuck-gations; the goddamn U.N. will come in, sovereignties will be disputing ownership, fucking law and goddamn order will fill this wonderland of debauchery and righteous sin with puritan assholes, hippies, government garrisons and all that is wrong with this world, stampedes of fucking pricks that deserve a cactus sodomizing, a lashing of the ball sack and a cut-off cock with a nice new shinny fork in their necks. No, this won’t turn out well at all; no one has any idea about the kind of munitions here. The guerrillas themselves are dug right in, their numbers aren’t really known but sure as shit they could take on a small fucking army. Even Dem has got this place wired and ready to light up the whole fucking island; the goddamn headhunters have been here for fucking generations, what do you think they’d do to a Burger King showing up on sacred ground? This place was gonna blow, albatross in the turbine engine style, blood, guts and broken machinery. I was dead set against it myself, but it looked like I was going to have to pay a visit to our fucking Mayor.

It’s not that I didn’t like the Mayor, I just thought he was a corrupt narcissistic pedophiliac asshole who’d had so much plastic surgery done to his face that he now resembled a fucking clown, but man, he could party with the best of us. I guess he was the Mayor in his own selfish empathetically devoid prick sort of fashion, but he had all the dollars, meaning he was the richest fuck on the island, so he would control or settle things down by flashing the right amount of cash. He’d deal with the general infrastructure by throwing cash where it needed to be thrown, and the machine kept grinding on. As far as law and order on the island, he had a few guys take a run through town every now and again, they’d grab whoever was far beyond any acceptable level of composure, which ironically was usually Captain Edgar, Dem, and I. The jail wasn’t a jail at all, really, just a fucking dilapidated one-floor wood house with no locks and no guards, but it was considered very fucking rude to leave before morning.

The three of us even had our own room reserved there, due to our frequent incarcerations; three cots and a fully stocked beer cooler with a window opening out towards the bay. The Mayor would even come down and eat breakfast with us from time to time, and we’re not talking shit hotel continental toast and insipid viscous coffee slime; he would bring down a full on spread of fruit, yogurt, and eggs any style. The Mayor’s name was Alberto, but not really; it was actually Todd. His sunburnt skin gave him the look of a Spaniard of sorts, and that fucking louse-ridden Salvador Dali mustache really complemented this false persona perpetuated by the mix-matched army general costumes he wore all the time. A such, he could really give off the impression of being someone important when he wanted.

Todd wasn’t Spanish at all, of course; he was as white as a Ku-Klux-Klan bed sheet. He’d gotten himself wrapped up in some Ponzi scheme back in the States somewhere not too far from the beginning of time. Along with human, gun, and endangered animal trafficking, this guy was about as close to evil fuckery as they come; he even started a small war in the Middle East somewhere by supplying both sides with heavy duty fucking munitions, Christ! If there was any money in genocide, he’d be right in there. Anyway, with the Law, IRS, and other unmentionable sinister groups hunting him down, he got the fuck out of Dodge and ended up here.

He was Alberto: Todd, Mayor, General, and whatever other aliases he had printed on fake passports. We just called him Mac, which he took to almost immediately. He was here on the island years before the three of us; I’d guess he was about ninety, probably preserved by a constant regiment of smack used over decades, and of course his bloody fucking clown face, surgically massacred by a goddamn blind doctor or an unpaid monkey, huffing away at a paper bag filled with glue.

Mac set up a compound at the opposite end of the beach from where the dump was, where my future shack/donkey ranch/crime scene would be. It was a pretty fucking dilapidated and dangerously precarious set up in the end, but it had a concrete wall/barrier thing encircling a two-story brick building with a garage (Mac had shipped over some sweet rides) where both structures leaned to the left a bit. Beyond everyone’s beliefs and betting pools, that fucking thing has stood for about sixty years. I would never go in the fucking thing, though; it would be just my luck to be sipping cocktails with ol’ Mac when some Soviet piece-of-shit satellite came crashing through the goddamn roof while I was trying to make it with some fucking tourist broad.

Anyway, I’ve gotta collect my rats and get cleaned up. If it’s going to be a shit show, I’ve got to get over to Mac’s!

***

Dead Dog Day, Part 1
Dead Dog Day, Part 2
Dead Dog Day, Part 3
Dead Dog Day, Part 4
Dead Dog Day, Part 5

Dead Dog Day, Part 1

The leftover evidence of last night’s macabre massacre of debauchery was seemingly crawling furiously out to sea and with the same determination back on up onto the shore. There was no grace this afternoon, it was going to be a new vicious type of sodomy.

I was laying half on and half through the holes in my lounge chair, somewhat conscious but mostly unconscious. I had a field of vision somewhere between the angle of my sunglasses and my bucket hat, I was clutching a mostly finished bottle of rum, and I’d fallen into a worrisome self-induced atrophy, horrified by the thought of that barbecuing sun creeping around my sunglasses and shooting a powerfully concentrated beam of unshaded light into one of my eyes that would then manifest into a horrific chain of events leading to the eventuality which included my brain beginning to savagely slam itself into the sides of my skull like a hyena tripping balls in a small enclosure.

I cautiously began to raise my arm to plug the rum bottle into my mouth, moving almost robotically, careful not to move too abrasively, bringing on the inevitable beginnings of what could have been the worst hangover I’ve ever had. The plan was to get just enough rum into my system so I wouldn’t die when I attempted to move.

After recovering the ability to swing my head sluggishly from side to side, anxiety began to set in as everything I hoped didn’t happen actually did. There were bottles of every size shape and color, bodies strewn out prostrate all over the beach, hopefully still alive (I’d been getting heat about that lately), piñatas busted open coming in on the surf, still spewing out pills syringes and dildos of remarkable size, as such would require hospitalization immediately upon insertion. Party favors, wallets, purses, wigs, clothing, all sorts of luggage, an a small herd of donkeys painted up with foul slogans, butterflies and flowers, swastikas and peace symbols, and some very dangerous incantations from the Necronomicon. They were roaming the beach looking just as stunned as me.

I regained some motor skills and with that, fell straight through the already doomed lounge chair, its aluminum supports crushing and bending around me. I was fucking trapped without any cigarettes or hope for help from the preferably not but probably dead people on the beach. I started to feel some sensitivity in my body with the realization that I had vomited, pissed, and shit all over myself.

“FUCK ME!”

I had managed to squirm around a bit when I noticed my old faithful bag of angry rats to my right. They were pretty fucking angry, given the fact that they were now beginning to drown in the surf. I reached over and, using the bag of angry rats, for leverage I managed to pull myself from the clutches of that abyss of plastic, plaid, and aluminum.

Struggling to stand, I swung the rats over my shoulder. I felt like I wrestled a fucking bear and lost horribly. Looking back at my shack, I could see where this confrontation might have occurred. It had been completely leveled, a sort of wrath of god without prejudice type of leveled.

It was then that the bodies on the beach began to rise all around me, crippled, desultory, and thoroughly lobotomized, holding their heads in an attempt to stop their own brains from killing them. They were all damn lucky they hadn’t been decapitated or cannibalized; the island was full of headhunters and crazed experimental surgeons who had been expelled from their countries due to their bizarre, horrific, dark alley atrocities committed without consent or appreciation. They were always on the prowl for bodies, dead or alive, just so long as they could carry them off without attracting too much attention. We also had a black market where human organs of any value were tossed around, bought, sold, and packaged up to mail off to someone who would be having a very nice Christmas. It was like a butcher shop for exotic meats. For all I knew, it may have been our biggest export.

There were many ways to die on the island, hence the bag of angry rats I carried without falter, everywhere I went. Nobody is going to fuck around with someone fucked-up enough to walk around with a bag of angry rats, the intimidation factor is enough for anyone to steer clear and be on their way. I’ve only ever had to use it a few times, but my bag of angry rats had become the source of dark subterranean legends on the island. In all truth, it’s a disproportionate massacre. I’ve never seen a body being torn apart like that, shreds of skin and bone exploding out beyond any discernible radius, intestines strewn about the bars and streets, hanging from the rafters, tourists being killed off with shrapneled bits of skull and cartilage. Most people get kind of religious after seeing something like that.

I stumbled over to where my hovel had become a heap. It was a dump, I mean a REAL dump, seeing as how I had built the thing from materials FROM the actual dump, which in reality was only about a hundred feet away. I don’t know if that meant I’d been technically living IN the dump, but it didn’t matter anyway; I wasn’t going up to town to check the city plans at this fucking point.

I was still shitting myself as I made my way to the crime scene (the sort of Voodoo type of debauchery I’d been involved in had the unfortunate random side effect of incontinence), the beach pocked with grenade holes all up and down its shore. No doubt this had been Dem’s handiwork. Dem was our local demolitions expert, officially retired, but he sure loved to light up a party. He was infamously known for tossing sticks of homemade dynamite from our local watering hole, The Corpses Cantina, out into the street at passing tourists. I saw one get his fucking leg blown off once, but it was all good fun.

Setting down my bag of angry rats in the sand, I opened it up and and let them out for a little run. I usually feed them a little PCP at parties; it gives them a nice little bump and makes them particularly ferocious. And, based on how they went tearing down the beach, I’d wager I probably gave them a little bit extra the night before.

Gazing around with glassy eyes, it was then I discerned some unusual debris scattered about the catastrophe zone, splintered planks of wood and mangled machine parts strewn all along a deep rut carved into the sand. The distinct odor of burnt oil and gasoline hung in the air. Upon closer inspection, I found all the evidence I needed to convict the murderer of my shack. Someone had driven a bloody boat straight up onto the beach.

I didn’t have time to investigate much further before a furious blue bolt came down from the sky like a sledgehammer of the gods, exploding straight through my skull and into my brain. I had officially without a doubt begun what was most probably to be the worst hangover I’ve ever experienced in my whole fucking life. Death was on the table, self-induced or otherwise, dehydration levels were off the scale, and my brain was attacking me from within. Literally, psychologically and philosophically, I was working with the I.Q. of one the little monkeys that hang around town throwing their feces at tourists. I was legally retarded, I wouldn’t be making any educated decisions for days, and I would never actually fully recover. Other people shoot people like me out of “basic humane sympathy.” People here become government property, ushered off to Area 51 where they’re stuck into closets with decomposing aliens.

It was a “Dead Dog Day” as it goes, here on the island. I’ve never known the origin of that saying, but everybody seemed to have their own version. I’ve always envisioned a dog, too beaten and whipped in the unrelenting boiling hot sun to even crawl across the road, where a huge bucket of cool refreshing water awaits. Hours later, in total anguish and torment, the dog has made it a quarter of the way across the road when a huge truck comes speeding by, flattening the dog’s head and introducing its contents to the world at full velocity. The horrifying punchline to this specific version is that the dog doesn’t die; he just keeps squirming and cooking in the sun and on the searing hot concrete, still trying to make his way across the road, occasionally getting hit, his body a disintegrating atrocity. However strong his determination, he never makes it to the other side, but he never stops either.

I rummaged through all the sealed rubber bags I could find (always store your important shit in rubber bags; everything on the island always sinks at one point or another), looking for a pack of cigarettes and anything that I could summon up the ingenuity to make fire with. Having scored my booty, I plunked myself down on the engine casing of the wrecked boat nearby. As I sat smoking away, I shifted my weight a little and received a horribly acute stabbing sensation in my left testicle. Somehow keeping my balance as I almost lurched face-first into the sand from the pain, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pair of boat keys.

“FUCK ME!”

On the island it was an unwritten, unspoken, semi-criminal but perfectly acceptable behavior to steal other people’s boats, and I was one of the more infamous abusers of the “let it slide” understanding that most of the islanders possessed, having to frequently steal each other’s boats themselves. Small children learned how to hotwire a boat before they could even kick a ball or throw a grenade. The interior of the island was thick with jungle and virtually untraversable, aside from a few side roads and a number of leftover WW2 mine fields, so you had to travel by water if you were going to get anywhere.

Back in the 1950’s, some rich expatriate hiding from what most people who end up here were hiding from commissioned the construction of a fleet of lifeboats to address the issue of transportation and to protect the islanders during the unpredictable but inevitable bi-annual sinking of the island. It still happened these days; twice a year, the whole fucking island would sink into the ocean on random dates. It would sink in a matter of chaotic horrifying hours, and half an hour later, the water would all drain right back into the ocean along with everything that wasn’t too heavy or tied down. This expatriate must have been in it thick, because shortly after arriving, he gathered up a bunch of his “men” and set them on an impossible titanic mission to go out and erase all evidence of the island’s location. Whether breaking into map stores or infiltrating secret libraries, he called them R.A.M.’s (Reassessing Agents of Maps) and sent them off to the four corners of the globe. I’d never seen the island on any map or heard of anyone who had, so they must have done their job. As for the wealthy expatriate, he died of syphilis four months after he arrived.

If I wasn’t to die today myself, I would have to gather a small but very specific bunch of supplies. First was some really dark spiced rum, a few bottles of which were already secured in an old nonfunctional chest freezer, one of the few possessions I had that was still standing. Secondly, a shit load of clonazepam and Tylenol 3s, the ones with the codeine. I should probably crush them down to a powder and take it in the nose, but I really wanted to avoid any superfluous extremes. I also needed dump trucks full of cigarettes and an adequate amount of fire making equipment. Finally, one or two “Fucking Fucked-up Fuckers”, an extra special cocktail that was only served at The Corpses Cantina. It started off with a 16 oz blood rare steak, the brains of a mostly extinct unmentionable animal that may or may not be on the endangered species list, a clusterfuck of hallucinogenic roots, mushrooms, and insects, and as far as the real truth goes, nobody really knows.

As it goes, I would have to message the cantina for my cocktails to be delivered, as I would never make it into town without a surprising newly evolved gift of super-flight or a splitting up of atoms Star Trek type of transportation device. We have a message service here called “The Monkey Chain”; for years the islanders had trained some of the smaller monkeys (the ones that throw feces at tourists in town) to perform all sorts of abominable tricks and tasks, some homicidal, some slightly crossing the lines of pedophilia, and they all knew how to use guns with expert marksmanship. “The Monkey Chain” was mail delivery system owned, operated, and governed by the monkeys themselves. All I had to do was whistle a particular tune, and a representative would come bouncing on by, picking up the parcel and whatever the going rate was that day, depending on the dangers to be traversed en route to destination and the size, weight, and legality of the object being shipped. But in general, most monkeys would just take whatever wad of crumpled up bills you threw at them.

The monkey came by as I was ineffectively attempting to create a sort of tent-like canopy thing. I had already made up a bed/coffin out of splintered boat planks, but I still needed that fucking sun off me. The monkey took the message and some cash for the cantina; I hustled him into accepting a handful of rusty 38 caliber bullets that had been soaked in salt water for months but still worked most of the time. The monkey sauntered off but not before chucking a little slimy chunk of feces in my face.

The entire empire of monkeys and other simian species on the island beat the human population 4 to 1, so this in itself demanded a great deal of acceptance and fearful respect. “MONKEYS THROW SHIT”; they’ve been throwing shit since before the dawn of man, who I suspect threw their own shit for a while along the evolutionary trail. It was something that you just had to expect; at some points during the day, every day, you’d have shit thrown at you and after a while the islanders just got used to it. It gets so that you hardly notice it, nobody complains, nobody cares; it’s like living next to a railroad and somehow adjusting your senses so that you never notice when the wretched trains scream by.

As it goes, about ten years ago, some of the more charismatic and abstract-thinking monkeys managed to get a book published in Sweden, where it was misguidedly  translated by those believing it to be a New Age Arabesque/Southern Caribbean language crossover of symbols and claw marks scratched into bark by Pigmies explaining the do’s and don’ts about dieting in the rain forest. The monkeys were rightfully pissed and tried to get it pulled from the shelves until they found out that it was a bestseller in some war-torn third-world countries and the money started coming in. The actual book wasn’t bad; it was called “The Deciphering and Literalizing of Different Styles and Forms of Feces Throwing in Accordance to the English Language.” Every piece of shit thrown means something, you see, and the monkeys did a hell of a job in the making of this book. Unfortunately, however, it was scratched into bark and completely illegible. I did catch some of the few nuances and a definite style emerging, but in all honesty, I really didn’t understand a word of it.

In the meantime, I had managed to rig up a minimalistic desultory type of shelter for my temporary hospitalization. The sail from the “borrowed” boat acted as a canopy held up by a mix-match of some precariously fashioned poles, ores, a hockey stick, three rifles, some rusted pipes, rope, and a lot of wiring and tape used in place of actual rope. The bed had evolved a little, in that it was now covered with life-jackets and dirty cloths. I’d even managed to fashion an easy to reach bedside table out of an old up-turned soft drink box. Everything was carefullly placed with the precise purpose of me not having to move anything but my arms; cigarettes, lighters and matches, books, writing materials, all my pills with a facility to crush them for nasal ingestion if it came to that, an extremely exorbitant amount of bottles full of rum, and still quite enough room for my cocktail delivery, which was scheduled to be arriving shortly.

I guzzled the “Fucking Fucked-up Fuckers” cocktail and lay back into my makeshift casket. Cigarette lit, pills taken, rum opened with book in hand and a feeling of slightly reduced velocity to my brain’s bouncing exercises, I managed to drift off after smoking a joint the sheer size and elegant rolling of which could have been presented to royalty. The dreams/nightmares that followed I couldn’t recall, but I woke screaming bloody murder, having no clue of who I was or how I managed to get into this person’s body.

As disorientation and self-loathing closed in on me once again, so too came in the relentless tides. Sitting up, clearing my eyes of sand, salt water and monkey shit, I saw standing before me  a petrified, shaking, gelatinously slatherhed shadow of one of my better friends in the realms of debauchery, Captain Edgar.

Captain Edgar wasn’t a captain at all; he couldn’t paddle, steer, start, swim or barely even get onto a boat out of fear and an acute sense of unbalance. Plain and simple, he liked to pretend he was a pirate. He had one of those black t-shirts with the Jolly Roger printed on it for every day of the weak, he had an eyepatch which he randomly wore over a different eye depending on his mood and the time of day, he carried a lightsaber that was hardly ever lit up due to the salt water getting into the batteries all the time, and he spoke in a dreamed-up version of what he thought pirates might sound like. For this, we really got on his case, so he localized speaking that way to the more touristy sections of town.

There he was, standing before me stark naked, shivering, crying and vomiting a little. The gelatinous goo he had been covered in was unfortunately the digestive fluid of one of the many giant carnivorous plants growing in and around the jungle. It was a surreal and arduous task to succeed in escaping its clutches on your own, and most people carried a grenade or two for this specific purpose or for any other tight situations that inevitably arise on the island.

I set Captain Edgar down gently like a mangy puppy I’d just kicked and felt bad about. He was speaking in tongues and obviously out of his mind, far beyond the everyday madness of his general persona. I wrapped a blanket over his shoulders, which was actually a louse-ridden tarp in the midst of disintegration that I had pulled out of the dump.

After filling him up on rum, pills, grass, and half a pack of cigarettes, his frenzied demeanor began to throttle down a bit, and decipherable words began to emerge from his quavering mouth. Disjointedly at first, but soon enough the words manifested into full sentences and I could see through his fiery bloodshot eyes into his shattered mind that he was beginning to realize where he was, who he was with, and under benevolent duress he slowly came to accept that these particular dimensional coordinates was the place he was supposed to be.

Here I was, half dead and trying to endure the kind of damage to my brain that only a few homicidal deranged Nazi surgeons could ever even conceive of, and I’ve got to workshop through whatever misadventures had come upon my cohort while in all likelihood his brain had already been covertly transplanted with a jellyfish.

Upon reaching semi-composure and constitution, with the pills and rum finally succeeding in carrying out their job, Captain Edgar’s ethereal self popped back inside of his mortal frame, no doubt with its own collection of tales of the macabre, but now with all extraterrestrial components of his personality back in place. He continued to speak, and I listened without any sympathetic or empathetic curiosity. I wanted him well enough to survive this day, but I wanted him the fuck gone.

He started out with the carnivorous plant story and I drifted away, having found myself in that particular situation many times before, as most if not all of the other islanders had at some point in time. I just couldn’t take another perpetually spinning broken record of an experience that everyone on the island had already fucking been through. He went on about some situation in town where some idiotic drunk tourist went off “old west style”, blasting his snubnose revolver and demanding to be compensated for a handful of worthless rusty bullets some monkey had sold him. I began to start nodding off, Edgar’s story turning into a kaleidoscope of bewildering sounds, until hearing that unmistakably worrisome word that indicates the inevitable incursion of law and order and white bread, a puritanical invasion into a surreal land where everyone is hiding from something, where there wasn’t a legal object, event, sexual exploit, book or other writings, paintings, substances of any sort, machines or items that at some point might be called machines anywhere on the island. The curtain was going to be opened and a destructive deviant wizard was going to pop out with vicious ambitions. There were guerrillas positioned all over the jungle, Voodoo cabarets, and whorehouses that allowed unspeakable and impossible incorporeal sex parties, some of which were affiliated with a few monkey unions who were trying to get their shitty little paws into everything as of late. Everybody had stashes of guns, drugs, and other antiquated munitions. We weren’t just talking about grenade launchers and dynamite, we had tanks, howitzers, functional missile silos with malfunctioning and mostly missing launch controls, cannibals and headhunters and anything and everything we didn’t want the Coast Guard to find.

I understood the politics of the island at the level of a retarded child in kindergarten, but I did know that there were very secretive, back alley cutthroat, end up disappeared or decapitated or both, kind of channels in place that kept certain organizations and sovereignties away.

Captain Edgar was looking pretty horrified, pointing his finger in the direction of the bay where a cruise ship had recently run aground. There were Coast Guard rescue boats everywhere, they even had a goddamn helicopter, and how the fuck didn’t I even see them? They’d been in clear site for the entire afternoon. This whole disastrous event, this exhibition on fire, the wolves are at the door with claws, laws, and a pair of keys.

A while ago I surmised that some of the more elite islanders, rich in physical wealth like property and precious metals, those that excel in the dirty playgrounds of commerce, those with an obscene amount of ammunition and massive murder machines that literally ate the ammunition and spat it back out, they were the ones who stood the most to lose. Their homicidal projectiles choose their own course, asses blasting off and velocity manifesting into a momentary consciousness within the metal itself; they know where they are going, homicidal projectiles choose their own course.

Anyway, I’m talking about “payoffs”; even an island such as ours needs an outside source of incoming cash, grass, and ass. The ocean liner company Oceanic Falls was the only cruise line that came to the island aside from the stray ships that get lost and end up in our bay, which was a very risky kind of bad news for them, due to the itchy trigger fingers perched on high ground. That said, we have not as of yet caused any international incidents.

Oceanic Falls was on the verge of bankruptcy. They had a small fleet of cruise ships all fucked up and sinking, hence the irony of its name. It was the cheapest vacation available with deep sub-level amenities such as the absence of seaworthy lifeboats, busted shitters replaced with buckets, food rations from WW2 served up on paper party plates and plastic forks, no plastic spoons or knives mind you, just the forks. The pumps rumbled viciously day and night to keep the boats afloat due to the lack of funds and personnel to actually fix the numerous holes in the hulls. The repair crews had left the company with advice from their union years ago. Duct tape and inept, unschooled, uncertified welders were the only things keeping the boats afloat, shit houses on the water with the stench of impending doom trailing in their wake.

So the deal was that Oceanic Falls was the only ship line that was permitted on the island. Oceanic Falls agreed not to disclose the whereabouts of the island or what unspeakable atrocities occurred there, and we wouldn’t report any possible infractions seen or heard about the condition of their boats. Unfortunately, this “deal” was based on the misguidedly tenuous belief that all would go as planned. The Coast Guard ship running ashore was never part of the plan, their presence wasn’t planned, and the gruesome manifesting consequences of this catastrophic event were most certainly not planned.

As it goes, asses are asses, and I’ve got to worry about my own. I’ve got a painted herd of donkeys that aren’t going anywhere, dangerously huge dildos, copious amounts of pills, other drugs that require syringes, and syringes, all erupting from probably once obscene pedophiliac-themed piñatas. I was concerned that, all pieced together, the evidence would point to a super-perverted mass abomination of animal rights and possible investigations into any solicitous activities concerning children. But who the hell was going to check out the dump? I mean, the stench and fumes this time of day were a biological hazard, and being the dump it was nicely tucked away at the far end of the beach, next to where the jungle began.

My thoughts turned back onto Captain Edgar, who was presently out in the surf, curled up in the fetal position next to one of the donkeys who seemed to have taken a liking to him. The donkey was licking his face and positioning himself to do some unmentionable things to my friend. As I dragged his ass back to my ramshackle abode, Captain Edgar began coughing up sea water as well as some horrifying truths about the previous night.

Pointing out at the mayhem still unfolding out in the bay, he meekly said, “WE crashed that boat.”

At the very same moment of Edgar’s confession, there came a stir behind us where the beach meets the trees. A man emerged in full-on jungle camouflage with all the bells and whistles, his face painted with tiger stripes, a helmet geared up with night vision, a menagerie of grenades representing every nation that had ever sold or smuggled arms pinned all over him, strapped with huge Desert Eagle side arms and carrying an M16 over one shoulder and an AK47 over the other. JESUS FUCK, he was a walking museum piece, a collective aberration sporting a piece of every modern war that had ever been fought anywhere.

It was Dem, of course, the third member of our viciously demented little crew and consensual contributor to most all of our unspeakable debaucherous behaviors, including but not limited to thefts, property damage and destruction, potential homicide (unproven), the blowing up of things arbitrarily, general crimes against humanity, and that unfortunate night with the cow and the parachute which we all felt really REALLY bad about.

“What do you guys remember about last night and this clusterfuck out in the bay?” Dem calmly asked, regarding our living corpses.

We all squatted in a circle like the chiefs of some warrior clan going over the strategical intricacies of some integral insurrection. FUCK, in all reality, we all fell into heaps onto whatever was flat and wouldn’t explode beneath us. Our conversation resembled apes trying to sign words the other apes didn’t know, an extravagant tableau of atrophy and self-abuse, completely unable to decipher the numbers that led to the equals sign.

It took a lot of time, pills, and rum, but we finally pieced together the most probable version of the prior night’s events. We figured that, by morning at least, we’d all be held up in some third-world jail. No passports, no money, no booze, and no chance of ever reaching the civilized world alive. I’d have to find someone to take care of my bag of angry rats.

***

Dead Dog Day, Part 1
Dead Dog Day, Part 2
Dead Dog Day, Part 3
Dead Dog Day, Part 4
Dead Dog Day, Part 5

The Cab

It’s seven a.m. The taxi I called an hour ago hasn’t shown yet. I call the cab company for the third time, and the dispatcher doesn’t have to say fuck off—I hear it in her Marlboro tone. My phone goes dead signaling she hung up.

I’m a college dropout. I work in a department store to pay my loans. Most days it’s either quit my job or commit suicide, and by sunset I’ve done neither. My ex-drunk boss tells me I have no work ethic. He isn’t wrong. If I’m late one more time I’m fired, he says. I hope he keeps his word. It just might save my life.

It’s cold outside. I walk to the Kwik-Mart. The sixty-something woman behind the register asks, “You’re still here?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“That cab ain’t come yet?”

“No.”

“That’s just wrong,” she says but does nothing more because there’s nothing to be done. She stands before a backdrop of cigarette cartons, their colors forming a mountainside at dawn. I’m sure she’s always wanted to live in the Ozarks.

The cab arrives, two stores down the strip.

“Careful out there,” she says.

I shuffle across salt and ice patches and get into a yellow Taurus. The driver’s tobacco-stained fingers curl around the steering wheel. Two pink eyes stare from the rearview.

“Where’re you going.”

I tell him.

“Don’t know where that is.”

I tell him.

We go.

And the cabdriver, who believes nothing should be free, that a man should work dammit, “The problem’s all the Mexicans,” he tells me.

We pass a construction site, white noise of jackhammers, pop of a nail gun, a crash then bang and the barely audible cipher of orders shouted in a foreign tongue.

“Never tip,” he says, “Mexicans never tip.”

He has a grandfather who fought in The War, probably a son or daughter stationed in some Middle Eastern country he can’t pronounce.

“Humans have been the same throughout time,” he tells me.

I sit quiet in the back seat. The driver tells me about the world. He drives slowly. Outside, a sunless overcast turns the sky the color of plowed snow. Monoliths of it rest melting in the grass by the sidewalk. Water forms glistening braids down the gutters. It’s ten minutes after the hour. I’m going to be late for work.

Anointed

I had been working the evening shift for the past month, and I’d just pulled my first double. I was tired, but needed a bite and something to drink. I stopped at Bronk’s Bar on East Allegheny Ave to get an eye opener, or in my case, a sleep aid. The bar also served breakfast. I needed something to eat. Eggs would go fine for dinner.

I was shocked to see Tommy Monaghan sitting at the bar with a shot in front of him. I had known Tommy most of my life. He was never a big drinking man. He was more the religious type. Always had been. Altar boy. Mother’s pride. He could fight, but rarely cursed. Attended mass most mornings before going to his job at Lucky’s Appliances.

So I asked him, “Tommy. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at Nativity BVM?” Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a Catholic church in the heart of Port Richmond.

Tommy looked up from his drink with eyes red and drooping.

“Oh, Jimmy. It’s all changed.”

“What do you mean?”

I thought he meant the liturgy. I don’t go to church much, but when I do I like being able to go through the routine with my eyes closed. It’s jarring when the familiar words aren’t there, a new version of a prayer or ritual. It’s like when they edit scenes from a movie you watched in the past and show it on cable, the now forbidden lines or gestures removed and replaced with a scrubbed script. It’s just not the same.

“We’ve had a falling out. An argument.”

So it wasn’t the liturgy, I thought. His wife must have left him again.

“She’ll come back, Tommy. She always does.”

“It’s not Abigail. We’re doing fine. Patched up our differences. Renewed our vows. It’s God. We’ve had a falling out.”

“God?”

Maybe it was the liturgy after all. I asked to be sure.

“Did they change something again with the mass?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s much bigger.”

“What, are you an atheist now?”

“No. I could never be an atheist. It’s just that God and I are no longer on speaking terms.”

“How did this happen?” I asked.

Tommy downed his shot.

“It was a week ago. I was on my way to mass, you know, before catching the bus to work. I had this twitch, the kind you can’t resist, and let out a fart. I think nothing of it, then I hear the voice.”

“A voice?”

“Yeah, a voice. Loud and clear. ‘TOMMY. TOMMY MONAGHAN.’ I looked around but didn’t see anyone. Then I heard the voice again. ‘TOMMY MONAGHAN. I’VE BEEN WATCHING YOU.’ I looked around again but still didn’t see anyone.”

“What did you do?”

“I asked, ‘Who are you?’ And the voice said, ‘I AM YOUR LORD, YOUR GOD.’”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I am dead serious. The voice said it was God. It said, ‘YOU ARE A GOOD CATHOLIC. YOU SHOW YOUR LOVE AND DEVOTION FOR ME. THEREFORE I HAVE CHOSEN YOU TO BE MY PROPHET.’”

“Look,” I said, “even I know from parochial school that if a voice says it’s God, it may really be the devil.”

“I know. I know. But St. Thomas Aquinas also taught that if we hear a voice that says it’s God, we have to do what it says if we believe it is God. Or something like that. I can’t remember how Sister Hilda put it. Even so, I asked for proof. The voice showed me visions of my life, secret things, memories I have not shared with anyone.”

“So you believed?”

“I did. I believed and I listened. The voice said, ‘MY CHURCHES ARE EMPTY. MY PEOPLE DO NOT ATTEND MASS. YOU WILL CHANGE THAT.’ So I asked, ‘How can I do that? I am no preacher.’ And God said, ‘WITH THE GIFT I HAVE GIVEN YOU.”

“What gift, Tommy?”

Tommy looked at me with his red eyes, “Just let me finish telling the story. God said ‘THE GIFT YOU SHARED WITH THE WORLD BEFORE I SPOKE.’ So I think, what’s God talking about?”

“Go on,” I said.

“Just be quiet and listen,” Tommy chided me. “The voice said, ‘THE FART. I SHALL GIVE YOU ENDLESS FARTS. FARTS THAT SMELL SO BAD CROWDS WILL FLEE FROM YOU. NO PLACE WILL BE SAFE FROM THE SMELL, EXCEPT IN MY HOUSE. ONLY IN CHURCH SHALL THEY FIND REFUGE. YOU SHALL GO THROUGH THE WORLD RAISING A HOLY STENCH AND DRIVE MY SHEEP BACK TO ME.’”

“Is this like a new plague?” I asked, sniffing the air.

Tommy’s mouth gaped. “That’s just what I asked God. And you know what He said? ‘ONLY IF YOU TAKE IT THAT WAY.’”

“So, I asked God,” Tommy said, “What about me? Does this mean I will never be able to attend mass again? Surely my farts will follow me there and drive the people out?” And you know what God says? ‘THOU SHALT NOT FART IN CHURCH. IT IS ANATHEMA.’”

“Anathema?” I asked.

“It’s like forbidden,” Tommy explained. “Only more formal. You know. God talk. Something really not nice. Can I continue? I need to tell this to someone.”

“Go ahead, just let me order first.”

Tommy waited while the bartender listened to me ask for a shot and beer and a plate of eggs and bacon. When the bartender went back to the kitchen, Tommy resumed his story.

“So I asked God, ‘Do you mean my stench will turn off in church?’ And God says, real clear and emphatic…”

“Hold on,” I said between bites of bacon. “What does emphatic mean?”

Tommy’s brow wrinkled. “I think it means serious. Serious and loud. That’s how I heard it. So anyway, God says, ‘NO. YOU WILL HAVE TO LEARN TO CONTROL IT IN CHURCH.’ Can you believe it? Who can control that sort of thing? I mean, when it has to come out, it just comes out.”

I drank my beer and set the mug down. “Did you tell God?”, I asked.

“Of course I told him. I said, ‘That seems awfully hard.’ I told him farting is natural, uncontrollable at times. And a fart comes out so much easier when you are relaxed in prayer or mediation.”

“Or while exercising,” I added from experience.

Tommy nodded, then continued with his story.

“But God said, ‘THOU SHALT NOT FART IN CHURCH’. So I ask, ‘Why? I can’t understand it. Farting is common in church. After all, you are relaxed and you’re sitting in your own…’ God interrupted, ‘DON’T SAY IT,’ but I had to. You know how I am. Once I starting talking, I can’t stop until I get what I have to say out of my system.”

“P…”

“DON’T SAY IT.”

“..E..”

“DON’T SAY IT.”

“…W…”

“AARGH!”

“Then God went all fire and brimstone on me, burning bush, pillar of fire, the whole thing. He told me I was no longer his disciple and I was going to Hell. I suffered severe burns and was hospitalized for two days. So, now we’re not speaking anymore.”

“Sounds harsh,” I said, slurping down the last of my eggs.

“It is. It is so hard to be separated from someone you love. And I love God. I really do, but He can be such a jerk sometimes.”

“I hear you.”

“And no sense of humor.”

“Very little, it seems,” I agreed.

Tommy sighed, “I always thought there should be more jokes in the Bible.”

I agreed, and let out a big one. The bartender scowled and propped open the door.