Walk It Off

[Joe Shit The Ragman]

Some days I'm convinced I live in a squall. The sheer tempest of
sudden violent winds is often accompanied by precipitation. I live for
these days when the latter comes in the form of hail. I saw a cartoon
in 1958 depicting an obscure man's viewpoint of the world and now I
have become it. I remember distinctly this following snippet of
cartoon material that some writer penned in early 1958 and put to
cartoon format. This was before they had incessant background music
and following to cartoons, and it was of course all in black and
white, though we did have colour televisions, the industry had not the
funding to go to RGB. Strangely, though, NHK (whose broadcasting
language is Nihongo) did, of all places, go colour in that same year.
Anyway, what I remember seeing about hail in 1958 from an obscure
man's viewpoint is best described as follows: A man in a checkered
suit, slightly obese, notes out his office window that there is
considerable hail coming down. Fearing for something, he rushes down
innumerable flights of stairs, passing the same woman in a flowery
dress about five times (laughter). We see a shot of a different man
wearing, note this, a narrow black tie and tapping a pencil, also now
looking out the window, noting the hail, and similarly rushing down,
only he uses the elevator, which affects his metabolism visibly
(laughter). This is way before Cheap Trick existed. We cut back to the
first man. He is rushing through a parking lot getting a lot of hail
in his large eyes (laughter). He locates a car and shoves his hand
into his pocket and apparently he's wearing rubber trousers because we
can see the form of his wiggling fingers obscenely through the side of
his trouser leg (laughter). He produces a glimmering singular key (we
don't react to the fact that it's a key to a medieval warded floodlock
and not a standard pin-tumbler lock such as all cars are equipped
with) and shoves it into the side of the door and somehow unlocks his
black Oldsmobile with it, and leaves a cloud of dust (in a hailstorm,
mind you) hovering in the air as he dashes inside. True to its own
dated nature, the man is dwarfed by the interior of the car: the front
seat is one huge monolithic and unforgiving bench, the steering wheel
is as base and utilitarian as one can get, the gauges are head-sized
and innumerable, looking rather more like the cockpit of a B-17 than
the interior of an Oldsmobile, and he starts the car with a much more
beefy sound than even a 4-4-2 could have mustered six years later,
and, even more ridiculously, tendrils of flame shoot out the exhaust
as if the headers had been dumped on a much hotter car (laughter). He
pulls the car out much more quickly than one could possibly MOVE one
of those behemoths if they had JATO, and proceeds, in the hail, to an
unidentified spot in the parking lot where there are no cars or
buildings and proceeds then to drive the car around frenetically in
endless circles with a worried look on his face and the sound of
machine-gun fire surrounding him. We watch him speed around in circles
in the hail for a good three minutes, then cut to the other man
rushing out of the building he was in, running around in the pavilion
in front of the building in the hail very carefree and excited. We cut
back for two seconds to the other man, who is frenetic and overworked,
sliding all around on the huge bench seat, sweating bullets, looking
fit to have an appendix go on him any second followed by a three-alarm
heart attack and a spleen. Flash back to the second man, who is virile
and doesn't care that Nantucket even exists; he is almost dangerously
aloof; Dan Rather is not yet a threat to anyone, and David Bowie isn't
even alive, Geraldo Rivera is in grammar school; when you look into
his eyes you can see the planet, you can see the alpha and the omega,
you can see THE BEGINNING and you can duly see THE END, he is one of
the latter's malefactors, he is getting sick of spaghetti and american
prison; there aren't even dreams yet of an internet, much less one
where, armed with the proper knowledge, the average man can access
thirty-nine pages, each containing over thirty thumbnailed pictures,
all depicting some Kodak Moment in a struggle between a young naked
woman and some bread dough which, at the end of the pages, is already
a loaf of bread (and those of us who didn't bother actually staring at
the pictures long enough to know wonder to ourselves in unison, "Did
she just diddle herself inside an oven hot enough to bake bread??")
and similar loaves of which are sold to the public via a simple credit
card number, much less one where we all know this company who produces
it is going to get no fewer than thirteen thousand Angry Pen letters
from fucking graduate students in Nothing Management with bachelors in
Eat Shit And Die (which is what I majored in and went on to get a
doctorate in and subsequently teach for thirty-nine years) and South
College Frustration, each one citing the company's dire
FDA-requirement public posting of the Nutrition Information and noting
that none of these loaves of bread have enough of The Spice Of Life
Itself in them to make a difference as it is apparent through these
findings that blah blah fucking blah bottom line is you're peddling
bread that doesn't have any cum in it and we're a bunch of pissed-off
citizens because of it, and here's our lawyer-friends' pager numbers
in case you want to make a Federal case out of this, he doesn't know
or care about any of that; he is borderline fictional yet as real and
serious as death the inevitable, he is The Omega Man (see the crazy
film by the same name, a vintage 1971, it's got that... that PANSY in
it, and it's so pathetic it's a laugh-a-minute!! He carries around an
MP-40 and cuts one in the movie theater he pillages!) but with style,
he's slept with everyone and knows their secrets, he has a grin on his
face that instantly worries Military Police and mental heath care
providers, behind that grin is more than a man is a punk perhaps the
first on earth the first in a cartoon a postmodern carefree icon of
everything without culture without society without grievances without
a cause and maybe somewhere he has a printed T-shirt reading, "Through
the ashes of destruction a new society will arise like the phoenix..."
though the author doubts it, because if it were truly like the
phoenix, everyone would embalm their parents in eggs of myrrh, and
myrrh is patently hard to get ahold of these days, and they would also
live for five hundred years and die by self-immolation, and studies
show that only the mentally disturbed have the wherewithal to go that
way. But that is what I have become, I have become than man dancing
around in the hail watching everyone else fret and worry and drive
around in circles, drive themselves into the ground and die of
pubescence which was put off by their busy routine boring days until
it finally killed them, from an obscure man's viewpoint in a 1958
cartoon. Like a fog rising off the waters of the East Bay that scent
percolates and rises off her loins and permeates everything ever in
contact or closeness with them for any extended period of time, that
hearty earthen deep-toned sincere lasting eminent intoxicating
wholesome intimate grin of a scent that only twenty percent are
capable of producing. Today we went out and continued in the memory
and in the spirit of SNAFU '99, which we were both integral parts of
and within, see the "punk party" post for the complete story, we went
all over trying to get my brass knuckles bronzed, assisting Amoco
employees in criminal acts, specifically expedient B&E, of which I am
a master, visiting destruction upon suburbia, discussing criminal
enticement as a possible viable mode of revenge for someone, trying in
vain to chloroform a choir (we did get one guy to faint, though the
jury's still out on whether or not he was in the choir, but basically
we just ruined the carpet), harassing skiers in the middle of summer,
and plenty more assorted mischief waiting in the wings.

The call was more or less routine, if not for anything else than for
placement it stood out. It was rather early in the morning, about 0630
hours, I get up at 0600, luckily, but I get the idea that she wouldn't
have let me sleep through this particular call. I answered the phone
and she of course recognized my voice and immediately started
apologizing for waking me, and I cut this line off and informed her of
the situation, and she seemed a mite disappointed but got on with it
steadily. The phone call lasted all of two minutes and I was on my
way, a piece of bacon in my mouth, throwing on my jacket and boots
over my Glitterati trousers and _Taxi Driver_ "Here Is A Man Who Would
Not Take It Anymore." T-shirt and heading out the door, smiling even
through the bacon. I ran over typographical errors in Braille getting
out and twenty minutes later met her at the doorstep, this time fully
dressed and ready to go, similarly wearing the jacket. A high hat
sounded underwater and on a very odd whim I pointed to her chimney and
said, "If you decide to slide down that thing, it's safe to say you'll
be having soot for dinner the next three days or until they can
demolish it, which requires OSHA clearance, to destroy a chimney. Har
har har." she couldn't really anticipate or counter this, so she stood
in amazement looking at me and slugged me in the gut. I dodged and
dropped into a fighting stance, low and constantly moving. I have
superior coverage, I'm told, and look quite menacing, yet she was able
to laugh and point and I removed a cigarette and lit it, handed it to
her, and lit another one. I must have miscounted because we ended up
with me smoking three cigarettes and her smoking one all at the same
time, with me asking, "What the fuck's going on? How did that happen?"
while interchangeably smoking three different cigarettes and her
standing there trying not to laugh. My only estimation is that it was
very early in the morning and she was actually plotting this, I just
don't see it happening otherwise. Soon afterwards we were in the car,
listening endlessly to track six on a new comp that's okay, not great,
that I picked up the day before and haven't listened to yet, track six
is Against All Authority's previously unreleased "That Way" which is
no doubt the best track on the entire album, with a rousing chorus of
"I wanna beat you up / Black and blue 'cos you're not like me / And I
ain't nothing like you / And I wanna keep it that way", the song just
rocks, there is however a low point with the horns and shit, but it's
really brief and overall sounds like really pumped-up Misfits. I
needed to get gas, so after rocketing down the same old road I slowed
predictably and swerved into a tight corner, and when you've got that
much car bearing down on the tires you're going to get some
resistance, and that I did, the tires screaming into the corner, a
little faster than I had predicted but nothing I couldn't handle, and
I had to make another tight turn into the gas station, slowing for
this one. I decided to get some coffee so I paid inside, which may or
may not have been a mistake. After filling the tank, we wandered
inside to find a harried-looking employee who had obviously been
working since ten last night if not longer rushing around to serve us,
going back through his little door into the world as he sees it from
behind false hope provided by what's known in the trade as BR glass,
usually Lexan or some cheap form of Plexiglas two or three inches
thick, which may well stop a bullet on the first try but the bullet
will do it more structural damage than it can withstand, and the
second shot is usually quite clean, and it would do NOTHING against a
shotgun or even anything more powerful than a .357 Mag. I paid and the
employee gave me change and then leaned grotesquely against the glass
and asked me if I could help him with something in the back. I didn't
know what this could hurt but I warned him that it's been more than
forty years since I've worked in a gas station, he laughed
unassuringly and led me past a row of freezers into a very tiny,
cramped breakroom of sorts which it was quite apparent no one used as
it was ten times cleaner than the rest of the place. He pointed to a
large filing cabinet and told me that he needed to break into it
because his manager was a cunt and took the keys and had this
obsession with keys, stealing every last one of them, even the ones he
needed to repair the pumps and on and on excitedly, the poor man was
about to piss himself on my accord, so I told him shortly, "Look,
there's three ways of doing this: Shoot the lock off, pick the lock,
or bust the cabinet open. You usually have the keys to this?" He
nodded and showed me a crude slim jim of sorts which I grant you took
some knowledge and ingenuity to have manufactured using only a
screwdriver, some pliers, and bits and pieces of crap he found in the
store. I tried it out and told him that this was a bar-lock, and he
couldn't shim it open because the locking mechanism was housed inside
some sheet metal on the other side. I suggested for my own sake (he
had also fabricated a pick set complete with a working tension wrench,
and I looked the other way, the last thing I needed was to be stuck
trying to pick some simple lock in a fucking Amoco so some kid could
steal something) that we just bust it open, and he told me he'd tried,
and I replied that he hadn't tried hard enough, and took the handle in
one hand and braced my shoulder up against the other door and yanked
it, knowing that the bar would bend fairly easily and pop right out,
and I had it halfway and he asked somewhat incredulously, "Uh, is this
going to hurt the door?" "It shit-sure will. But you have pliers." And
with that, I gave it a final yank and it popped out and the bar
mechanism dropped to the ground with a positively awful sound and the
doors came flying open. "Shit!" "It's open, have yourself a good time
in there..." and with that I left abruptly, leaving the little man to
his work. We grabbed free coffee on the way out and I began laughing,
stammering, and sputtering phrases in German. "Stiefeln und Abendessen
... Brot und Zirkusen ... Tretmühlen und ährentragende Stellringe..."
"What are you going on about?" "Oh, what? Nothing. I'm muttering to
myself in German. My usual reaction to burnt coffee." "What uh were
you saying?" I thought back a second, rewind. "Stiefeln und
Abendessen... that's the phrase for "boots and dinner", Brot und
Zirkusen ... "Bread and circuses," and uh ,,, Tretmühlen und
ährentragende Stellringe, that's "Treadmills and spiked collars,"
nothing really of uh _note_..." we sat there and said, "Hee hee hee"
into our paper coffee mugs staring into the rising sun. We sat
comfortably and then reflected upon all that SNAFU '99 had come to
mean to us. Individually OR from a Big Sheet perspective it boggled
the mind how something so simple could have become so large in scope.
The simple fact was that the entire idea had sprouted from the pigs
raiding a show and a bunch of us running to the same place at the same
time. It was beautiful, some kind of immaculate fucking conception,
that we were able to make out of it what we did because it had none of
the earmarks of a significant event yet that was easily what it had
become. Krista intoned gravely and suddenly, "Leadership, that's,
that's what it's all about, in't it? I mean, you can change any group
of people if you can become their leader. It's something that takes
skill, it requires experience, it's an acquired skill, it's..."
"Complete and utter bullshit, that's what it is," I interjected,
choking on the burnt coffee. "It's the equivalent of calling the bomb
disposal squad for a macaroon what dropped into your yard. For
chrissakes, a LIME, a fuckin' LIME off a lime tree! Or for that matter
calling the Ethiopian Catering Service if an unexploded bomb drops
into your yard, or a giraffe's head, or a half-ton razor blade, or a
bunch of minotaur corpses or some shit, I don't know, I just
completely lost my fucking train of thought. Can you believe this
goddamned coffee? It's like warm motor oil that's been in an engine
for seventy years of hard use. The streets are paved with crack
cocaine. Uh, yeah. Back to what I was saying. That's a line and you
know it, even if you don't know it, I'm telling you now you know it.
Fuck it." I got out of the car and walked a half-step and hurled my
cup with as much force as I could muster against the window, and it
exploded in a brief cloud of stinking burnt coffee of some type. I
opened my trunk and sorted through my sectioned mass of goodies and
located an old but useful stick of a new composition which contained
gelignite, which will burn on water, removed it, and walked over to
the side of the building, a huge brick wall, as expected, with a large
trough of mud in front of it, and started applying it neatly in huge
letters to spell out "FUCK OFF!" across the side of the building.
During this time Krista got out and walked over to me and started
trying to resume the conversation. "Bloody hell, just fuckin' forget
about it already. There's something wrong with me and I don't know
what the hell it is, but I'll bet you six hundred and twelve dollars
and tenpence that it had something to do with this _fucking_ coffee
shit." "What exactly are you doing to that wall?" I looked her in the
eyes and bobbed my head from side to side grinning strangely and told
her matter-of-factly, "I'm going to light it up," and with that made
my final stroke and flicked out a lighter and proceeded to fire up
each word. It burned spectacularly for seven minutes and twenty-two
seconds, during which time we danced around it while a good cover of
"White Riot" blasted from my parked car and I bellowed, "This redhead
town will feel the steelman's rust!" When the flames went out there
were solid black stencils that looked like primer or thick black soot
but did not smear or wipe off. We got back into the car and the
previous conversation was effectively dead. So I began anew. Placing
my meaty paw over Krista's thigh, I leaned in and made note, "Our next
stop should be Borders, but they're not open until eleven. That means
we have a little less than two and a half hours to kill." "So what do
we mmm do?" "I thought, I knew you'd ask something like that, so I've
prepared an answer. Thoughtful of me, isn't it?" "Quite." "Well, the
answer is that we go into the Planning Phase. This does not
necessarily place us at a desk somewhere writing out plans, we could
be doing something else entirely." "What are you insinuating?" she
asked with a strange grin and both hands on mine. "Well, I rather
thought it best to leave that up to you." "Fair. How about we swing
back to my place and showw..." I cut her off. "Hold that thought. I
need to go in and inform that asshead of the terrible quality of his
hot beverages. Accompany me?" She rolled her eyes and head, both in
different directions. For some reason this gave me a stiffy. I'm
fifty-six, strange things happen with my body, and I can't explain
them all. She finally responded, "Yeah, sure, this sounds like fun." I
raised my eyebrows and she nodded and we exited the vehicle. I stormed
in and accosted the half-asleep dude behind the cage who was just then
wrenching open the BR glass, it was almost all the way up. I slammed
my fist hard on the counter and growled at him, "Oi!! I am
dissatisfied, THOROUGHLY." This woke him up, and allowed me not to
waste any verbiage. I half-screamed, whilst pointing at the machine
what dispensed me the burnt awful coffee, "YOUR KAPOOK-IN-O TASTES
LIKE FUCKING SHIT!" Krista started laughing at something I said,
apparently it was quite funny. The guy behind the counter didn't seem
to understand me, so I stormed out into the area from which the drink
was dispensed, slammed on it repeatedly, and repeated my statement. I
walked back over to him and he told me he'd clean the ...something...
machine and that he was very sorry for the inconvenience. "THAT'S NOT
GOOD _ENOUGH_!!" I thundered. "I PAID FOR COFFEE AND GOT BURNT
THIRTY-WEIGHT MOTOR OIL!" "Öl! ÖL! Ich habe Öl gegessen! Können Sie
nicht verstehen? Öl! Es war grausamlich gebranntes
Dreißiggewichtbewegungsöl und ich nahm es ein! ICH BRINGE DICH UM!"
and with that I spit at him and tried to grab him over the counter,
missing by that much, I wanted to get him by the collar and yank him
back, face-first into the still-dangling thick BR glass. He reached
under the counter for something and a thousand thoughts ran through my
mind but then again I knew that, unless it was a well-hidden personal
weapon, which he was too young to possess, all such franchises no
matter how high-risk have a strict policy against firearms anywhere on
the job site, and, my hand on my pistol, relaxing and dropping as I
noticed it was but a screwdriver, he jabbed at me with it, I caught
his hand as he came to the apex of what the counter allowed for reach,
nimbly took the screwdriver, held it in my right fist, pinning his
hand flat on the counter with my left, and savagely but not
destructively slammed the butt of the instrument down onto his
metacarpals, turned, took aim, and flung the screwdriver like a knife
(but without any balance to speak of) into the kapook-in-o machine,
where it cracked the plastic cover, and I stormed into one of the
aisles and removed a quart of motor oil and unscrewed it and walked
over and poured it through the coffee filter into the pot, and
promised him that I'd be back with about a hundred and forty guys to
tear this place to the ground at precisely noonteen today. He held his
hand and staggered back towards the office, where there might be an
alarm but more likely a phone, and I turned and left. Just then, a
customer approached and I held the door for him, commenting that the
guy running the place is absolutely insane and tried to stab me with a
screwdriver, acting quite shaken-up but hustling to the car. Krista
could not contain her laughter. "What?" "That was a little overdone, a
bit overdramatic, but comedic. I'm interested more and more in this
German you seem to break into at odd occasions. What did you say this
time?" "I just said, "Oil! OIL! I have eaten oil! Can you not
understand? Oil! It was gruesomely-burnt thirty-weight machine oil and
I ingested it! I WILL MURDER YOU!"" She cracked up. Finally returning
to her senses, she queried, "So what IS open this time of day?" I
thought about that and came up with a short list in my head, chose
something, giggled fervidly, and replied, "A store that sells
dollhouse furniture in Aurora and in fifteen minutes a certain mall
what has dead eels in the fountain." I started the car and took off
for her home.

Once there, we again went through her house, though this time there
was no one about to worry for, and she went into the kitchen and
wielded a huge piece of cutlery and used it to cleave a Hostess Cake
with aplomb, offering me half. I accepted and cringed at the taste of
whipped cream in chocolate cake. "Not the best of cuisine, but I had
to get it off the table before ants or roaches got it." "Lovely," I
responded, as I walked around into the living room and collapsed on
the comfortable couch, thinking as loudly as I could, "_Get over
here!_". Something must have worked, because she sauntered over and
collapsed on the backs of my legs, not the most comfortable situation.
"Last year we bought a fence..." "Wha?" "A fence, heh heh mm heh a
fence..." I flipped over to face her and gave her a look as queer as a
three-dollar bill. "Guess what its name is?" "Eugene?" She laughed
heartily. "No, Arnold. That's the fence's name. Hee hee hee." "Are you
all right?" "Yes, I'm fine. Now what was this about a planning phase?"
I thought a second. Elaborate, that's what it had to be. Elaborate and
odd, totally random. An idea came to me. "We could, at the moment, use
a spade, two stiff drinks, a doughnut if one is available, an ashtray,
a dingus, a soupspoon, a ladle, and some nice stiff background music."
She snapped her fingers and rolled off the couch, catching herself in
midair and popping to her feet, a nice move, and sauntered up to the
stereo and put in some Anti-Nowhere League and cranked it up. Nice
system. Lots of speakers, most of them hidden in the walls and on
pedestals, and a strange omnidirectional speaker hanging from a cheap
chandelier which had phenomenal bass. No doughnut, but in a few
minutes she located the rest of the items and set them on the floor
next to me. I got up and walked over to the fireplace and inspected
the poker. Seeing as how I used to hand-forge entire fireplace sets
(even the bellows, which remains my favourite piece) what sold for
upwards of three hundred, I knew what I was looking at. These were on
the good side of what commercial forges turn out. I hefted the poker,
it had hardly any weight to it, the balance was off, but it would
work. I checked the tip for soot, finding none, and, semisatified,
returned to the couch and removed my boots and trousers. "What are you
up to?", she asked, slightly alarmed, more interested than offended,
as it should be. "I'm gonna jack off onto the next helicopter I see,"
I replied loudly, "haw haw haw." "That's terrible, you'll clog the
rotors...?" "That reminds me of a joke, really, it does." "You're
sure? Go on." "Okay, here's the joke: A repairman is walking through a
mental institution. He comes up to the first room and sees a man
swinging an imaginary baseball bat. "What the hell are you doing?" he
asks. "I'm Babe Ruth. As soon as I hit a home run I'm outta here!",
replies the man. The repairman wishes him well and continues on his
way. In the next room, there's a guy swinging an imaginary golf club.
"What the hell are YOU doing?" he asks. "I'm Jack Nicklaus. As soon as
I make a hole in one I'm outta here!" replies the man. The repairman
shakes his head and comes up to the next room. There's a guy sitting
naked balancing a peanut on the tip of his dick. "What the hell are
you doing?!" he asks. "I'm fucking nuts, I'm never getting outta
here!"" Krista laughed heartily at that and took a seat right up next
to me. "So what is your plan?" I sighed, fondling the poker (heh, not
for the first time) in her living room. "Most of my life I've operated
on a wing and a prayer and a whole hell of a lot of knowledge, and
most of the time there wasn't even time for the prayer. So I propose
that we simply select a few random locations and check out the scene
and gather intelligence, which is usually boring as fuck, so, to make
up for that, we'll also just randomly go about and cause trouble and
watch the results. From that information we will form a plan. First we
need some places to go. Sound good?" She just laughed. "Sure."

It was then that we had several stiff drinks (she had a full bottle of
Early Times bourbon and we drank quite a bit of it, I only had two
12-oz. glasses with a little ice, she had three or four over a
relatively short period of time and subsequently got a bad case of
what's known as "dragon hiccoughs", which are fairly rapid and quite
painful burning spasmatic (Thanks to Kelli for that word) half-hiccups
accompanied by a slight hack per each hiccough, usually short-lived,
less than a minute) and she cussed out Rob Roy. I was working on a
draft of our plans and was about 4/7ths done (I had written twelve
words) when Krista saddled my thighs and started talking incoherently
about something and drifted off and then snapped back and asked me if
I had any Stuff on me or could get any. I flipped through my pocket
and extracted a container with benzedrine and meth in it, which I have
on me at all times, it seems, and dispensed some of the former. Things
would be quite interesting for the both of us. She tried to prevent me
from molesting a ceramic cat and I countered by replying that I had
one brass tooth and couldn't see the harm in it. About twenty minutes
later it sounded like a good idea to both of us for me to go running
around the neighbourhood screaming the lyrics to DK's "Too Drunk To
Fuck" with the poker in one hand and my schwanz in the other. I did
so, without any background music, making a complete idiot out of
myself in front of a couple walking along the sidewalk a ways away who
pointed and murmured to themselves while I belted out a horrible
chorus of, "Too drunk to fuck, Too drunk to fuck, Too drunk to fuck,
_I'm too drunk, too drunk, too drunk to fuck!!_" at obscene volumes
while Krista nearly gave herself a peptic ulcer laughing, curled up in
the doorway half cheering me on and two-thirds cackling and gasping
for air. I think she fainted when the mailman drove up, got out,
delivered the mail, stared at me screaming "It's all I need right now
oh baby I'm melting like an ice cream bar, Oh baby, And now I got
diarrhea, Too drunk to fuck!" He got back into his Jeep and drove off
to the next house, shaking his head. I finished up, my throat hoarse
as hell, panting, sweating, leaning on the poker, heading back in the
house, and the door swung shut on me and I heard a click. Fuck. I'm
standing outside the door without any trousers on and the village
idiot comes stumbling out of his garage next door to get the mail and
apparently water his lawn, and I remember that I left the car unlocked
and get inside, pop the trunk, retrieve my pick gun, saunter up
clandestinely as a man what's practically bare-ass naked can do, and
start on the lock, which takes me about 25 seconds to get open, I
twist the knob, pull open the door, look around, see no one, start
clearing rooms, make it to the living room, gather my trousers and
pistol belt, and put on my boots, still with no sign from her. I
remain quiet and station myself in the kitchen, where I'd see anyone
before they could see me, and I notice her looking around out the
windows, unaware of where I am and I quietly intoned, "Well has he
lived who has lived in obscurity -Ovid." She jumped a foot and tried
to locate the sound but I was already out of her peripheral vision,
advancing on her position quickly and invisibly. I got within arms'
reach of her and jammed two fingers into her pocket, pulling her in to
lean up against me. "In that area I will always beat you at your own
game, do not feel defeated." She put a hand around my shoulder. "I'm
not sure how you did that, and I don't think I'll ever know." "Pretty
much the situation. Shall we move?" "Sure. You got everything?" "Of
course."

We walked out to the car and observed the village idiot out there
watering his lawn, waving stupidly at us. "The guy might as well be
wearing one of those Disney ball caps with a beagle nose on the brim
and heh "googly eyes" with black ears and shit," I commented to her as
we reached the car, not bothering to return the waving. She laughed
tersely and got in. I returned the pick gun to its holster in the
trunk and started the car, flipping through CDs and settling on _88
Fingers Up Your Ass_. "Where are we going?" "The dollhouse furniture
shoppe. I need to buy a little table about that size and take it to
the mall. You never know just what the fuck you're going to find in
that dollhouse furniture place. Why, the last time I was in there,
which granted must have been at least five years, I found this fucking
miniature box of brand-name cat food, real cardboard and all, with a
wraparound label that was a severely-reduced photocopy of an actual
box. I sent it anonymously to the headquarters of the manufacturer of
that cat food attached to a lengthy letter that listed the
manufacturer, the manufacturer's address, expressed great concern over
copyright infringement and other evils. About two months later, I
checked my anonymous Post Office Box and found a very large package
within it. It was from this cat food company. I opened it, carefully,
as always, and found two huge boxes of their premium cat food and a
note thanking me in detail for providing them with the necessary
information to shut down this 'swindle'. Apparently one of their
copyright lawyers wrote it, I still have his business card somewhere.
I was damn lucky I had a cat, and even luckier that the cat ate."
Krista laughed strangely at this. After a short while we pulled into
the nearly-empty lot of the strip mall containing the craft store
which specialized in miniatures and other dollhouse accouterments. Not
about to be disappointed by an easy decision, we came upon literally
an entire aisle filled with miniature tables and chairs, each of them
_godDAMNed_ eerily realistic. "Holy ghrist!! There's... so MUCH of
it!" I exclaimed in wonderment. This triggered a roving clerk to come
and assist us against our will, and it was more like buying actual
furniture than buying childrens' toys. A LOT more. "What sort of table
were you looking for? As you can see, we have (deep breath) dining
tables, sectionals, occasional tables, card tables, coffee tables, our
*new* retro tables, which are made of much less expensive and much
more durable plastic and are decorated in vibrant colours and wild
patterns, some of which are part of our Bismarck UV line, which (heavy
breathing) glow just *wildly* under any of our ultraviolet or
"black"light systems, designed to emulate the wildness of the
nineteen-sixties..." at this point I was quite seriously thinking of
drawing my pistol and putting three 10mm rounds into the side of this
obviously deranged woman's head to do the planet a favour which could
never be repayed. I have been EXTENSIVELY trained in various aspects
of sociology, psychiatry, psychology, mental pathology, I know how to
deal with every kind of person there is, and I am secure in my
masculinity, yet it is rare indeed that I come upon a person who
actually FRIGHTENS me, and this was one of them. Not a dangerous
criminal, not a psychopath, a sociopath, an ideological revolutionary,
a madman, but something far more serious: This person's LIFE was the
products they sold, and the products they sold were extremely
realistic (and eerie, EERIE I tell you!) detailed miniature replicas
of ordinary household fixtures and furniture. The kind of person who
talks back to their breakfast cereal. A true cracked nut on a twisted,
paper-thin bolt. This was not a young person, she was almost my age. I
cast an emergency glance at Krista, who hid her reaction and then
snorted. She was laughing at my predicament. This person also had
atrocious breath, like she was a bulimic coprophile with rotten teeth.
I grated the teutonic plates of armour in my mind to steel myself
against this onslaught and let it continue. "Are you still with me?
Oh, good, thought I'd lost you. As I was saying, for those on a budget
or even those with younger children, these particular pieces present a
zero choking hazard and a very slim chance if any at all of breakage
or shatterage (she made that word up just for me, and that fact sent a
cold shiver up and down my spine) which leads me rather awkwardly into
our more upscale pieces, the Ethan Allen collection, available in
eighteen different pieces, each available in one, just one, **HA HA
HA**, just one (Hermann Goering himself could not possibly be as
horrid as this... this woman) of these six choices of stains and
finishes, indicated and replicated on actual *tiny* cute little sheets
of wood right over to your right there, your friend seems to be
looking at them, so you'll know what they'll look like without having
to try to judge through the distortion of the plastic bags. Now, we
also have the kinda quirky Adirondack selection, though there are only
three styles of tables in that one, and they're (getting far too
excited) made of real twigs, just like their models are made from..."
I coughed loudly. "I know what Adirondack furniture is." "Oh,
splendid. Well, moving right along, we have numerous makers of
cast-iron patio furniture, which consists of mainly tables and chairs,
and it's real painted cast-iron, just like the original, which can be
found on the endcap over there, and, in addition to those styles, we
have antique reproduction tables made from the same materials and from
the same designs of the *original* antique pieces, and, since we're
standing right in front of them, I can show you real quick..."
"Please, don't go to any trouble... PLEASE." "Oh, don't be silly.
Choosing the right furniture for your dollhouse IS IMPORTANT. Now,
here's a Shaker table, just look at that detailwork, masterful, isn't
it?" "Mmm. Uh, quite. they must have really uh tiny chisels." She
cackled then, and it produced a stench worse than if all the sewers in
New York City had backed up and overflowed in the middle of August.
The chemical it released made my eyes water. "And this is an
eighteenth-century longtable, indistinguishable from the original..."
"I'm not interested in an antique table. I'm not looking for something
contemporary. I'm looking for something that a sensible man would buy
to put in his home and use in 1976. What do you have?" "Well, we have
a frighteningly large collection..." "Fuckin' A right you do," I
muttered under my breath to Krista, who was having gobs of fun
watching me be hustled by this foul old wench into buying dollhouse
furniture. "...of tables that match that description. Could you
possibly narrow it down some? Are you looking for a side table, an end
table, a coffee table, a bedside table, a dining table, a dressing
table, folding table, garden table, plant stand, telephone table, sofa
table, tray table, billiards table, cocktail table, nightstand,
console table, writing desk, sectional furniture, veneer desk,
glass-top table, chinese, italian, Portuguese, vintage, irish pub
table, checkout stand with register, scanner table, office table, any
particular period, maker, material, anything like that?" I thought a
second. "You have a massive lung capacity, don't you?" No reply. Went
right over her head. "Um, what exactly is a dressing table?" She
hustled down the aisle and plucked something off the rack and handed
it to me. It was a three-legged triangular small table attached to a
large framed ornate mirror on the top. "No, I don't want a mirror.
How's a cocktail table look?" She showed me a short, stout table with
extremely stubby legs. "Nope, sorry, how about just a dining table,
something oval in shape?" She gestured to a ghastly amount of
miniature dining tables and whipped out a pad of paper and a stick pen
and began fervidly writing a list in some half-glyphic language. I
started looking at tables, they were all pretty much the same, and she
accosted me, pen in hand, and began firing off questions. "Would you
like a one-piece or a sectional, which can be elongated or shortened
by adding or removing a section?" "One-piece." "How ornate, on a scale
of one to ten, one being absolutely utilitarian, ten being perfectly
gaudy, would you like your table?" "I'd say about a four to a six...?"
She scribbled something down in an alien script. "Are you fixated on
any particular brand, such as our Ethan Allen Collection or our Powell
Collection?" I got quite upset, on the verge of tears at this
interrogation. I also lapsed back into a breetish accent. "Excuse me,
but what's the POINT of all this?" "To narrow down your selection and
make shopping here a pleasant experience." It was a robotic,
mechanical answer. I was about to soil myself. I sighed and wiped
sweat from my brow. "Ethan Allen Collection." She scribbled furiously
and grinned evilly. Cannibals, kidnappers, child molesters, serial
killers, even traitors to the United States, all came below this
person in the "who's more blatantly evil and hideous?" list. "Any
particular style or design catch your eye?" "No." "Well, that just
about wraps it up, looking over my information, I'd suggest that you
look at these six tables," she grabbed six packages off the wall and
handed them to me, "to make your selection. Alternate finishes can be
found on the racks that they came from. I'll leave you to it." If
there was a god, he was now on my hit list. The awful little woman
hobbled off, and I spat, "Knock-kneed daft old prat, hope you get
impaled for this..." Krista had disappeared. I sat down on the floor
and spread the tables out in front of me. They all had a green
cardboard card with the Ethan Allen logo embossed, actually EMBOSSED,
on them, in white, and some miscellaneous number and letter
designations in a little white square in the lower-right-hand corner.
They all looked the bloody same to me. One of them was very dark and
in the light looked purple. I tossed it under the rack. I did the same
with a sand-coloured one. I figured the woodgrain had been applied
rather than utilized as original, because even the grain of the wood
was to scale. I sat looking at the tables and just randomly picked one
that I believe was the same model and finish of the Ethan Allen dining
table I have in my home. It was unholy-realistic. It was as if some
band of mad scientists had a machine which shrunk actual objects,
reduced their density, and packaged them as dollhouse furniture. The
veneer had just the right amount of perfectly-smooth gloss, it was
flat as you could get, the legs were stout, every inch had the veneer
on it, and there were even little simulated chalk-marks on the
underside where the factory would have marked it. The thing was scary.
I threw all the other tables under the rack and started walking around
to find Krista. I located her absolutely enthralled with the rest of
the miniature items. Turns out she was looking for a little box of cat
food which, surprise surprise, she was unable to find. But she had in
her hands a gaggle of items that similarly violated copyright laws, a
box of dog biscuits, some Tampax (!!?for a dollhouse?!!), a collection
of titled, bound books (which did not open, if they did I would stake
my life on the fact that each word of the book had been laboriously
printed on the minuscule pages), and some other junk. I accosted her
and explained that I didn't want to get free boxes of tampons in the
mail, "no strings attached." She thought for a second then erupted
into laughter. It was so on-the-spot of me that I started laughing,
too. "No strings attached." It just came out. And it was a good one.
She dropped the items and was fascinated by a candelabra, I told her
to buy it. I looked around and found a miniature set of WORKING tools
in a Craftsman toolbox, I'm talking like twelve sizes of tiny
imprinted chrome-vanadium wrenches, a breaker bar, three hammers, a
mallet, a WORKING pipe wrench with actual grooved jaws, four
screwdrivers, two WORKING pairs of pliers (Channel-lock and
needlenose), a socket wrench what actually clicked (and probably would
work, too, if anyone anywhere made bolts that small), a telescoping
inspection mirror, a nonworking red power drill (Which means it was a
Milwaukee, they're always red, Makitas are dark teal, Bosch are navy
blue, Porter Cable are gray&black, DeWalt are bright yellow, Hitachi
are dark lime green, Skil, Craftsman, (spit) and AEG are black), a
putty knife, and a crosscut saw which actually had teeth sharp enough
to do some sawing cleanly, but not very durably or quickly. The hasps
and hinges worked and showed machine oil on the latter, and it had a
carrying handle, and I thought what the hell, and picked it up. That's
when I saw the beater, axe, and anvil. The anvil was a reproduction of
a standard 55-pounder, and was NOT a casting, it had been machined
from a billet of stainless steel, and weighed about as much as a roll
of nickels. It was a perfect reproduction. The horn was true, there
was an accurately-sized harddie and pritchel hole, the face was
crowned ever so slightly, it was perfect in every way. Even the finish
on it looked like an anvil, though it was a bit shiny and new-looking,
but after all, it had never and could never be used. It was a full two
dollars. Next to it were reproductions of fibreglass-handled heavy
demolition tools, a 20-lb. beater (sigh, technically a swing sledge,
and YOU, the uninformed, what's never worked iron, would call a
"sledgehammer") and a sharp-looking broadaxe with a properly oversized
and thick head. Just on a whim, I took one of them and tried to bend
the yellow handle easily, thinking it was made of cheap plastic and
not fibreglass, because that would just be unthinkable, but it did not
bend or snap. Epoxy resin, even, was out. These were the genuine
article. Bemused, I picked them both up for a scant three total
dollars and headed out. I handed Krista a ten-dollar bill and told her
to deal with the gruesome witch. She giggled and went ahead. I got
change back, so for less than ten bucks I picked up a table, a tool
set, an anvil, a swing sledge, and an axe with great potential. This
potential was realized as we got to the car and I fished around again
in the trunk for a sharpening stone set. I found that the little axe,
which is three and three-quarters inches long, was made of what I
believe to be ATS-34 stainless steel, with a Rockwell hardness of
66-70, better than most knives, and had some heft to it. I used a
diamond flat to do the initial sharpening and finished it off with a
fine stone, and found that, after almost forty years of sharpening
edged tools, I could put a razor's edge on a miniature broadaxe. Not
sure what good it would do, but it was sharp all the same. The swing
sledge had a similar metal for its head but it felt more like cast
iron, much heavier than the axe, incredibly dense, you could sit in an
airport bathroom and crack tiles with regularity using it, and
probably break a window.

I headed out to the Southglenn mall and, as usual for 1000 hours,
there were few people. I used the axe to open the plastic for the
table and removed it. "Hey, that's a nice little table," Krista
commented. Without a word, we walked in the mall and headed for the
pet store from which we had purchased the eels, which, sadly, had been
removed, but, happily, this meant that some shit-for-brains janitor
was pawling around for dead, bloated eels in the fountain at one
point, possibly in public view. I walked up to the salesgirl and asked
very professionally and innocently if they sold kittens. The answer
was of course yes, and I asked if I might gain admittance to the place
in which the kittens were kept. Overcome by the politeness in my
request, I was allowed into the little locked room which housed a
bunch of kittens in cages on shelves, unsupervised. Krista accompanied
me. I asked her to carefully select a kitten. "For what?" "You'll
see." She liked that, and after a while of inspecting kittens, she
pointed to one. "Are you certain?" "Yes, quite." "Okay, then." I
opened the cage, removed the small white kitten, which was practically
comatose, handed it to Krista, and inserted the little table in the
cage and replaced the cat, closed the door, and left. I
grandiloquently informed the salesgirl that I had given one of the
kittens a small table and then told her that I would send people back
every thirty minutes to check to see if the table was still in there
with the kitten, and if she so much as moved that table from its spot,
I'd know about it and I would return and make the rest of her short
life inconceivably painful, turned on my heels, and left, after
getting an awkward promise from the petrified salesgirl that she would
not touch the little table in with the kitten. Krista was acting
strangely so I turned and took her in my arms and passionately kissed
her for a good minute and a half in the middle of the mall, smiled,
and walked over to Auntie Anne's pretzel sales, and we both had
cinnamon-sugar pretzels and drinks, sitting on the brick planter wall
with our feet on the wooden bench attached thereto. I removed the axe
from my pocket and began to chop at one of the vine-like plants
growing there at the base. It worked. "Timber!" and the plant shifted
as it was cut free. "That looks like fun, can I have a go?" "Sure. It
takes a little getting used to, but it's not really that hard." She
happily hacked away at the plant as we consumed delicious pretzels. I
left my pretzel there and told Krista, who had become quite the
lumberjack of the mall planters, that I'd be right back, and I walked
about twenty yards to a Waldenbooks and picked up a paper and brought
it back to read through. As I was finishing my pretzel, I asked her,
"Have you ever been to the town of Monarch?" "Never heard of it. Where
is it?" "Hang on, let me steal a map of the state..." I returned with
a state map in my pocket and it took me a good fifteen minutes to find
Monarch. It was a hundred and fifty fucking miles away, and I didn't
want to spend three hours on the road just getting there, and that
would be if traffic was not an issue, which it most certainly was. It
could take five hours to get there. I explained this to Krista. If she
still wanted to go there, fine, but I was sure there were other places
we could go a little more towards convenient. "Why? What's going on in
Monarch?" "A fair." "Well, I'm fucking excited. I really want to spend
five hours getting to a goddamned fair. Pick something else." I looked
around and found something of interest. A chemical supply warehouse
was going out of business in the DTC, not far at all from here, and
the Lakewood Community Choir was going to be at a K-Mart. I pointed
out the possibilities for mischief there and an idea sprouted in my
head. If we could buy some chloroform and some little vials, we might
be able to gas people and cause them to pass out, without being
overtly noticed. I sat and said, "Hee hee hee" into my cup of coke at
the thought of chloroforming a choir.

After that we took off for Borders to get Chais and read through
magazines. Whilst standing in line, we discovered a punk working
there. The two workers in the cafe were having a discussion with
themselves and the customer, and the one worker was talking about how
some concert was all hair bands, and the other one said disgustedly,
"It's not hair; it's buttrock." The customer, a UPS deliveryman,
laughed and said, "That's good... That's a good one." Upon closer
inspection, and after exchanging a knowing glance, we saw that beneath
his frock (FROCK FROCK FROCK FROCK!!!!) he was wearing a Subhumans
shirt. I asked him where he got the shirt, he told me at a Teen Idles
show. That just can't be. They aren't even on the same label as far as
I know, and Subhumans would have to fly cross-country to tour with the
Teen Idles, and they aren't really complimentary bands, but what the
hell? We got our drinks and I thumbed through a fantastic UK mag
called Bizarre, it had full-page photos of a bear climbing a
transformer and the transformer exploding and the bear dropping to the
ground all burnt and shit, I laughed like a jackal at that, and then
this amazing photo of police raiding a rickety Buddhist colony
apartment and about thirty guys in midair because the stairs just
busted and one guy was holding onto a length of railing that wasn't
connected to anything, just vertical in the air, and the report said a
bunch of them got knocked out from the thirty-meter fall and some got
minor injuries. Then an aerial photo of Siberia where there was a
300-meter-deep (that's 984 feet, folks) and enormously wide concrete
hole in the middle of everything, it was a diamond mine somehow,
looked more like a bio-lab complex or a rocket base, but then again
I'm used to looking for those sorts of things and I wouldn't know what
a diamond mine should look like anyway. Then there was a picture of a
woman carrying a live young pig upside-down on her head wrapped
tightly in a fresh banana tree trunk, the magazine was fantastic. Then
there was some guy engaged in self-immolation, which isn't all that
extraordinary, but the looks on the faces of the people running from
him were. Krista, meanwhile, was thumbing through a porn mag and
pointing out typographical errors and photographic enhancements. I
reminded her that I could land her a very well-paying job doing
basically the same things that she was good at in her spare time and
she declined. That always pisses me off, when I spot someone with
talent and they turn me down. I was never a recruiter, in fact the NSA
does not HAVE recruiters, only the CIA and FBI do, the NRO, NSA, USSS
(Secret Service), and similar organizations get all their people from
transfers (like military) and walk-ins and recommendations. The CIA's
stuck-up as hell and the FBI is just a higher echelon of bored,
repeat, VERY bored pigs, and no one knows a damn thing about all the
rest, so it's not a happy community and therefore a ruthless and
effective one. KGB was good, but coming from the sociopolitical
shambles it did, we were always on top. I finished my Chai and went to
the can. This got interesting. The head in the place has one urinal
and one stall, and there were eight people, nine including me, in
there. It was crowded to say the least. Taking a cue from prior
(including military) experience, I lined up in front of the sink and
was about to take a piss, and one guy started laughing, I turned and
smiled at him, and another guy rushed up to me to object. "Why, that's
unsanitary! People wash their hands in there!" "There IS another sink
if you're in a hurry to wash up." "Stop this at once! I cannot
tolerate this!" I zipped my fly and turned to the guy. "Hey, if you
have such a problem with it, go outside, because I have to piss like a
race horse and this is the only facility available. If it makes you
happy, I'll let the water run when I'm done, okay, pal?" I turned back
to the sink. This dude tries to get between me and the sink. This has
attracted some bemused attention from the other patrons. "Now look,
I'm not a violent man..." "You better not be, in THAT body, you'll get
the shit kicked out of you. Would you move?" "..but I... I won't stand
for this! It's barbaric, a health hazard." "Oh, push off or get pissed
on." I whipped it out and started pissing in the sink, very neatly,
not making a mess or anything, and behind me in the mirror this guy's
fuming and dancing up and down and muttering. After a short while, I
elaborately step aside and run the water for thirty seconds and the
guy who was laughing clapped. The little man got right in my face and
told me that he was going to report me, possibly to the police. I
informed him that if he did that, I'd kick his ass up between his
shoulderblades, and that I was deadly fucking serious, and that I'd
have a friend waiting right outside the door for the next ten minutes
to kick his ass for me, laughed at him standing there with his left
leg shaking uncontrollably, turned, and left. Krista was waiting
outside. I gestured to a generic biker dude who was in the cookbook
section and appealed to him to stand right outside the door for the
next five minutes and tell my kid that I was waiting in the car for
him when he came out, and the generic biker dude heartily agreed, and
took up a position RIGHT outside the door, arms folded, and was still
there as we walked out the door. I laughed at the genius of my own
device, and explained the situation to Krista, who took a minute to
get it all to sink in, then laughed with me at the thought of the guy
opening the door, seeing the generic biker dude standing there looking
like he was ready to kick someone's ass, shutting the door and praying
he'd go away.

The chemical supply warehouse was like most others, but with lots more
hand-marked signs. I located some all-glass ampoules that screwed
together and were very cheap, and a funnel with which to fill them,
now all I needed was some chloroform, and for that, I walked over to a
large selling counter that looked like a pharmacy window. A girl of
about thirty with the nametag of "VICKI" assisted me, and I explained
that I needed some chemicals for use as industrial solvents, and I
required a half-liter of chloroform. She looked me over and asked me
if I knew what happened when chloroform was stored in the presence of
light. I responded, "It turns into phosgene gas, a lethal poison. So,
of course, I'll need it in a black poly container." She smiled as if
I'd just passed a test of some sort. She asked me if I had proper
ventilation and respirators, I replied yes, and signed a liability
form under an assumed name and she went back and quickly produced a
half-liter black bottle and stuck various labels on it printed out on
a dot-matrix printer. "Will you be needing anything else, Mr. Shelby?"
I thought a second. No, I did NOT need to make plastic explosives at
home. But if they had mercury... Yes, it was worth a try. "Well,
Vicki, there just might be. Do you have any quicksilver?" "Mercury?
Yes. We sell it by the vial. Fun stuff. Dollar a vial." "Do you have
sixteen fluid ounces of it?" "Oh my... Yes, we have that much, but
it's going to cost... thirty dollars. Shall I ring that up for you?"
"Sure. Thanks." I paid cash and we left. Krista wanted to know what
the mercury was for. I explained to her that if you mix dry ice and
acetone you get a solution which can freeze mercury solid and keep it
that way until it is significantly heated, and I already had lots of
acetone at home from working with golf clubs. "So? What do you need
hardened mercury for?" "Well, mercury has a density higher than lead,
and an extremely low boiling point. If I take a hollowpoint bullet and
inject mercury into the hollow tip, then carefully dip the bullet into
a bucket of acetone and dry ice, the mercury will instantly harden and
bond to the lead core without expanding at all. So now all I do is fit
the bullet to a cartridge and add powder and a primer, and I have one
of the most lethal cartridges imaginable. When fired, say at a human
target, the instant heat will liquefy the mercury, which, because it
is denser than lead but is of _lighter weight_, it will spread out
into a large metallic blob bigger around than a beer can, and will
arrive with as much or more force than the bullet itself, and it will
also prefragment, meaning that little blobs of it and droplets will
break off and strike the target with incredible velocity, basically,
fired at the chest, one of these rounds would completely take out the
heart, half of each lung, all the major arteries, induce incredible
shock and trauma, and cookie-cutter the bastard." "You mean...?" "Yes.
Leave a hole in him clean through anything in its path. A headshot
would reduce the head and neck to the molecular level, just a puff of
pink. The only thing better would be to have a bullet cast of pure
gold or platinum, but they would be very heavy and would drop too
much." "Have you ever seen the movie _Tombstone_?" "Uh, I think so.
Yeah, they had gold bullets in that movie. You're sharp as a miniature
broadaxe of my acquaintance." I patted her on the shoulder and loaded
the stuff into a heavily-padded ammo crate in my trunk which I usually
use to hold milk and eggs when I go to the store. Keeps it cold and
keeps it from moving around or getting bashed.

There we were, rolling down Federal with J Church blasting from the
monster stereo system with eight MTX speakers, including two
twelve-inch Blue Thunder enclosures in the back and a high-powered amp
under the passenger seat, the rear-view mirror blurred from the
"back-wrenching, tooth-jarring, stomach-thumping all-you-can-eat bass
of high quality", just looking around for some way to waste time, as
the sun beat down on the super-high-quality blacker-than-neon-black
paint job that looked like it was always soaking wet and three feet
deep, like a hologram or something, you could just pass your hand
through the neon black sheen of the paint on that car, the same sun's
fire reflected off the gleaming chrome accents and the custom badass
wheels and custom dual pipes, big around as though you could stuff
coconuts up them with no clearance issues, gleaming and vibrating in
tune with the pure muscle of the hopped-up 440-cubic-inch engine with
its sixpack of carbs putting out over five hundred horsepower to the
rear tires as wide as those on a Viper to get maximum traction to the
beast. Inside the car a special scent was constantly being created
from about three inches above the passenger seat itself, soaking
everything with its mystical and matchless perfume which spoke of only
its own particular originator, who happened to be my fare, my shotgun,
my passenger, my close friend, my more-than-that, my partner in crime
and my emergency navigator, a five-foot-eight-inch supple and
powerfully muscular container of one hundred and thirty-eight pounds,
all well-contained, deposited in all the right places through toned,
tanned muscle and, to be technical, a very thin layer of subcutaneous
fat, internal organs including a big heart and massive and highly
potent brain, teeth and bones, none of which was out of place and all
of which was shapely and curvaceous, accented by tight clothing and to
some extent cosmetics, though thankfully no artificial odours other
than some swipes of a lightly-scented underarm deodorant which
probably disappeared when it was not summer. Wearing a pair of
jet-black Oakley Eyejackets, the thinned and rubberized temples of
which extended back into her unbound, loose and not-overcombed deep
red hair the colour of the flames at the very bottom of an oil rig
what's just gone inferno, she strikes the world with her body. She
sits comfortably with a thigh on each side of the seat extending down
into the footwell where her bronzed smooth muscular calf swells met
black patent-leather fourteen-hole steeltoed Docs with glittery red
tubular laces without so much as a scuff on them and Z-Ben soles
resting on the carpeting, a half-smoked Camel Wide between her lips.
She inhales deeply and the tip glows brightly and then about a
centimeter of the paper-wrapped tobacco is replaced with a replica of
ash, she removes the smoke from her mouth and flicks the ash out the
window to the streets below and finally exhales a plume of grey smoke
tendrils gracefully from her capable mouth. Her eyes are ever-watchful
and are recording the events taking place at a low priority for later
recall, though the amount of benzedrine she ingested will wipe most of
this clean away. It also sedates her, removes her inhibitions about
anything and everything, relaxes her, provides her with a warm and
comfortable sensation of well-being and stimulates her interest in
spontaneous acts of any sort, greatly so. Physical stimulus is
exacerbated on the pleasure side and receptors are dulled on the pain
side. Not at all sedated, she is alert and aware; alive, she glows
with activity and the potential for anything. She casts a glance and a
smile my way and giggles charmingly. "Remember when we were riding
down I-25 and got cut off by that hatchback, and your response was to
attack it? I kicked off the fucking mirror, the look on that face in
the driver's seat was priceless, I was just thinking about it." Her
voice is medium-low and soft, though not at all mellow. Slightly
biting, it gets your attention and holds it like a bear trap. There is
no hint of an accent one way or the other so the voice is what we call
'neutral' and harder to profile but just as easy to voice-print. This
one even moreso, as it has a particularly appealing resonant
honeythroat hoyden quality and is quite distinctive and reflective of
tension or stress or excitement or what have you. Contrasting with
that sweet mellifluous tone comes my reply, housed in a deep, bassy
slightly rasping steely tone, as if my vocal chords had been panned
out on an anvil and tempered in a forge. There is inherent control and
command to the tone, there is some spirited confidence but it is not
overly done or nearing bravado, which I find ungodly-impossible to
listen to, and believe me, six years in military installations around
the country including basic training at Lackland in Texas, I've had to
put up with more than the average man. Extremely malleable, adaptable,
convertible, pliable, it can take on any of probably hundreds of
affectations, idiosyncratic and other inflections, to entire foreign
or domestic accents, a perfect camouflage developed in a sense for my
work where electronic signals could pin any telephone conversation
down to two definite people, that is, if they weren't aware of the
technology. So chamaeleonistic is it that it sometimes in times of
great duress or even intoxication flips itself into different
modalities, often accents I'm familiar using, sometimes flipping so
smoothly and cleanly that I am unaware that I have changed or altered
my voice in any way, as you should have read about. It is a hard and
sharp tough tool and commands attention as it is almost threatening in
itself, definitely powerful, it is a voice that cannot sing and would
rather scream or rumble softly. "Yeah. A real Frozen Moment, that. I
can remember giving the throttle a bit of a jerk as I saw your leg
come out aimed squarely at the side mirror, and after I slowed down
again to the same speed, the mirror was just gone, a pair of wires,
one orange and one black, being dashed by the wind, shorn from the
mirror assembly. Yeah, that was at least a good hundred and fifty
bucks' worth of damage we did to that car. We should have crept back
behind it and kicked out the taillamps or knocked the muffler off." I
chuckled heartily and changed lanes to dodge a Buick. "Better yet, as
I suggested, I should have brought a hammer and I could have done all
kinds of damage to the poor fucker, I could have busted the window and
knocked some teeth in!" I loved that quality about her and I often
told her this. Fiesty to the point of violence. I'm an instigator, I
start shit and when given the opportunity I always finish what others
have started. She comes off as a natural counterpart to this
affectation. We certainly click, anyone can tell you that. Yet the
relationship is not cyclic-destructive at all, it's productive and
progressive. As I see it, it is our job to make memories and to have a
good time with life, and we're doing a good job so far. I had a
thought that I was surprised hadn't occurred to me as often as it
rightfully should. "You know, I really owe you everything," I said
admiringly. "How's that?" "The end of SNAFU '99. Shortly after the
hairdryer incident, I believe, the weasel was out, you were letting
the tattoo get Neos-porin soaked in, I made a quick save for what
could have been immense pain, and then... do you remember saying the
words, "A henchman in a fur coat"?" "Oh, yeah, you claimed that you
had just gotten over some writer's block..." "No, not 'some', IT. You
helped me to overcome one of the toughest hurdles I have had to face
in recent history, you got me over that, I owe you everything. Thanks.
You ever need ANYTHING, your car breaks down, you break a leg, ghod
forbid, you need a favour you need some money you need someone out of
the way permanently whatever it's yours no questions asked, I give you
my word on that, and that means something, really, it does." "I
understand, Don Corleone." More than a hint of sarcasm. She then
busted up laughing. "I'm sorry ... I just ... it just came out, no
disrespect, I just feel so much more ..._free_ now, this stuff is
amazing. But really, yeah, it DOES mean something, it means a lot to
me, I'm not however saying that I feel like I deserve this kind of
indenturedness, I really didn't do anything intentionally... But I
accept it with honour and you know I won't abuse the privilege." "Ah,
but you DID do something intentionally. You stayed with me after the
rest had left. That was a conscious decision. It may have been that
there's just something about you that was able to break that barrier
in me, something special, and you know you're that, but something
beyond, you made the choice to stay there, and something within you
made that choice to free me from the depths of depression that the
writer's block imposed upon me. Could have just been as simple as you
wanted me to be happy, and subconsciously you knew you had the power
to do that, and made the choice to do so, but I have a feeling it was
more a culmination of different events and circumstances as well as
your choices, whether conscious or not, but, to put an end to this
sentence, heh, you DID make that choice consciously and in damn good
faith to stick around, and if you hadn't have done that we wouldn't be
here right now. Now I can't speak for you and say that you'd be
missing all that much, but..." "Stop it with the self-deprecating
rhetoric. That really doesn't do much for me. But I'm flattered,
thanks for the discussion, it has its merits. This will all..." Her
eyes went starry, her voice grew distant and mesmeric. "This will all
come back to you. All kindness returned, all inhibition lost, wrongs
righted, the shadow overtakes the light source, loss will become gain,
no,,, not something cheesy like karma, this will come back to us as if
a dream... Prepossessed occupation of destiny and the mind..." My
cigarette went limp as my jaw dropped slightly and I peered over at
her. It was almost genuflection. Realization. Some people have
visions, intangible conceptions usually about future circumstances or
events, under the influence of benzodiazepine narcotics. Lindsay Shaw
was able to, on a frighteningly occasional basis, accurately predict
future situations weeks in advance while under the drug's effects.
Research has been done in an attempt to disprove the allegations that
this and other hypnotics and sedatives at certain (uncertain) doses
induce accurate prognostication or the ability thereof, activating a
certain part of the brain that little is known about, and no
conclusions were drawn but notes from the experiments indicated that
about forty percent of test subjects were subject to spontaneous
extrasensory perception in the form of prognostication (there's an
official term for it, but I can't remember it at the moment) or
visionary-idealistic notional prediction which was on the whole
remarkably, some would say eerily, accurate. I recognized Krista's
altered state as having at least the potential for such activity and
listened carefully, intrigued by the phenomenon which I have never
experienced myself, though, as with all the test subjects, I have had
remarkably higher occurrence of Deja-Vu while under the influence of
the drugs. While incredibly vague, I was sure this would come back to
haunt me in some pleasant way. I was interrupted by a random thought.
"Hey, you want to hijack a streetsweeper?" "Sure, if we see one. Drive
it up to Five Points and run down a bunch of people in the streets."
"Uck. Those people up there, well, it's the sociological equivalent of
rice pudding filled with pubic hair." She laughed strangely. "What?
That's perhaps the weirdest thing either of us has said yet." "Well,
it can only get better from here on, then." "I suppose you're right.
What to do, what to do? I'm getting bored. Let's go light up another
gas station or something." I had a better idea. I pulled into the
parking lot of a grocery store and parked the car. As we got inside we
couldn't help but start humming along to "Lost In The Supermarket" and
after a while started laughing. I wandered over to a section of the
store where the tapioca beads were sold, and located a box which
couldn't be older than ten years (they have a shelf life of thirty)
and took it to the checkout stand to pay. Krista chirped in, "Wait, we
need to get something to drink!" I shrugged and followed her over to
the cooler where we got liter bottles of soda and dashed back to the
checkout aisle and paid for the items, food's always cheap. Krista dug
around in her bag and produced a strange Indonesian pack of
cigarettes, opened it, and proffered one to me. "What the hell is
this? Looks like a bidi." "It's strychnine. Just try it." "The box
doesn't have a tax stamp on it. It must not be tobacco." "Try the
motherfucker!" "Okay, I'll start it and you finish it." I flicked a
flame to the tip of the strange-smelling fag and the thing went up in
flames. "Fuck!!" Krista laughed sadistically. "They tend to flare up,
sorry, should have warned you." "Damn straight! What the fuck is this,
potpourri?" I tentatively took a drag and coughed and spat out the
window. "Sonofabitch, cinnamon and tar! This is fucking VILE! Take it,
take this fucking thing NOW!" I shoved it at her, waving away the
smoke in utter disgust. She smoked it a while and began hacking
herself. "So (kaff) what is your reaction to these (hack)?" I
responded immediately, "I think you just got me to smoke a suppository
you stole from the zoo, that's my reaction." She laughed and coughed
quite merrily. "Better or worse than menthol?" "That evil sonofabitch
is just as bad in my book. Here, let me see the ingredients." I took
the box and started reading a list of ingredients that wasn't there.
"Let's see, pigeon cunt, roofing tar, asbestos, chlorine, soot, bay
leaves, iron filings, catnip, TriNitroTolulene tip, anal bat
discharge, garlic powder, flash paper, eel bits, grit, remains of
Jimmy Hoffa, no, there's nothing out of the ordinary in here..." She
snatched the box back. "I get the message. Do you?" "Yeah, I'm reading
you four-by-four, it is your intent to poison me." "That sounds
vaguely like a song lyric." "It does, doesn't it? You want to
chloroform a choir?" "Yeah, but where are we going to find a choir?"
"I'll show you." And with that I backed out of the parking spot and
headed over to the K-Mart across town.

Once there, I opened the trunk and started funneling chloroform into
the thin glass ampoules. I only filled five of them, and I thought
only a couple hits would be sufficient, just walk by and drop or toss
them from shoulder height, the glass would shatter on the hard tile
floor and the fumes would, after a short time, rise to the levels of
the choir and people would start just dropping to the floor and no one
would have a clue as to why. I handed Krista two ampoules and kept
three on me, made sure the chloroform was positively capped, replaced
it and the funnel, and shut the trunk, explaining the plan to Krista
as we stood there, talking just as normal people might about trivial
matters having nothing at all to do with chloroforming a choir. Then
we had to locate the choir and fit ourselves into the crowd, if there
were one. It was perfect. Hardly anyone turned out at the K-Mart to
support the choir, but they were going at it anyway. Right outside the
pizza place inside the store. Their clothing was abjectly odd, they
looked like some rival faction of the Vatican Guard, they were all so
prim and pure and dignified and proper it like to make a man sick to
his stomach, their singing was atrocious, the store was medium-full at
this time of day, lots of old folks, and a few people, about ten or
eleven, were grouped about nine feet away from the little congregation
that was the Lakewood Choir, constituting the spectators. They
wouldn't be in any immediate danger of being felled by my chemical
warfare or of seeing anything, if I did it right. My tradecraft was
and is impeccable, I could have practically just brushed by and in the
process undone all the girls' bras, picked their pockets from beneath
the gaudy garb, switched the fingers their rings were on, unlaced
their shoes, gotten two of them pregnant, and handcuffed them all
together without being noticed, spotted, or raped by anyone even if
they were under close surveillance and armed guard. I decided to pick
definite targets, though the accuracy of these devices was open to
quite some speculation. They were considered an area weapon if
anything, and luck was the main factor of their effectiveness. There
were a few people standing close in, almost within a foot of the
choir-boys and -girls and -master, the ultimate latter of which was
centred like a conductor of an orchestra and even had one of those
little white plastic wands with the bulbous pressed-cork handle that
so fascinated me. He was a target. He'd be the last one to go down,
and I'd pretend to go over and help him and steal that fucking wand
(evil and/or raucous laughter) and use it to do naughty things to
Krista later on. So I had one target. But he had to be the last,
meaning there had to be at LEAST a first if not a second to his third.
I spotted a ghastly prim girl with awful spectacles, acne scars, and
cakes of makeup, as well as neatly-tied-back short brown hair, the
kind you just want to be sick into, standing left of center three
people down from the flank. I had given thought briefly to taking out
either flank, consisting of three people each, right and left, but
that would be too obvious a pattern. It had to be stock random, like
Falling Sickness ("Because The World Has Failed Us Both..."). So I had
two targets. Now I had a definite first-to-go. This was a tall, lanky
male of about twenty with the hair of a sportscaster and a face fit
for a perfume commercial, and an eerily castrato tone to his voice.
Maybe, I thought to myself, as I took aim, his balls just never
dropped, but he would. I walked briskly past and flicked the first
ampoule perfectly in front of his feet at such an angle that the glass
shattered in front of him and the liquid splattered, but the glass was
carried off between his feet behind him, so he'd never spot it even IF
he ever looked down. I pretended to bump into Krista with my head
turned the other way, and out of the corner of my eye saw her first
ampoule scream towards the front-right section of the choir ensemble,
and I hesitated and apologized and continued on my way, looping around
the choir to behind the little wall erected to designate the pizza
parlor from the part of the store you weren't supposed to be eating
in, and no one was there, and I hesitated and fired off my second and
third ampoules in rapid succession, the first of which burst just in
front of the foot of the hideous girl and the final shot which hit
full in front of the choirmaster. Without stopping moving, I headed
into the john. When I came out after forty-three seconds I spotted
Krista walking into the lingerie section of the store and I walked the
other way around the choir to meet her. We watched clandestinely and
none of our specific targets had dropped. Krista had thrown her last
ampoule at one of the guys standing on the edge of the choir but not
singing. Something was wrong. It should have worked by now. Just when
I was about to give it up, someone, I wasn't looking directly at them,
dropped like a stone and after a good while was assisted by someone
from the choir, helpful bastards, who began coughing and having
trouble breathing and left to get some air. This left the one who
fainted, a male who may or may not have been dressed in the regalia of
the choir regulars, I just couldn't see through the racks of clothing
and aisle-stands that blocked most of my view, and I wasn't about to
go around to get a better look for fear of being noticed, because no
one had shrieked or done anything out of the ordinary and therefore I
would be suspicious as an onlooker, this left him still on the ground
clearly dazed out of his skull, probably having lapses of memory,
extreme lightheadedness, nausea, respiratory distress, and a host of
other humorous things, holding his head and writhing around making the
choir very uncomfortable and even moreso when he vomited violently all
over the choirmaster's robe and shoes. I turned my head away slowly
and laughed vitriously. "We should... hee hee hee... probably best
leave now..." I choked, and we wound around the store and outside, not
spotting the other ill choir member, now laughing like hell. It became
worse for me when I imagined the possible outcome. I thought that the
head of K-Mart security (who for some reason looked and sounded
precisely like Henry Kissinger) would check the scene out, discover
the broken ampoules, and mutter to himself, "Stinkbombs." (remember
that he sounds *just like* Henry Kissinger). I explained this to
Krista well after we had driven off and after my fits of laughter had
receded, and she continued laughing until it hurt.

I fired up a smoke and had another idea. "Get the Yellow Pages from
back there, would you?" "Okay." She reached back and got the massive
tome from the floor of the backseat. "What do you want to look up?"
"Bronzing." She looked it up. "It says, 'See Collectibles'. I'm going
there. Okay, found it, a lot of shops offer bronzing, where are we
now?" "Find someplace in Cherry Creek or LakeWood." She scanned for a
while. "I've got three shops in the area," she listed off a few
addresses, "where are we headed?" I asked for a repeat of an address
that I thought I knew how to get to. Sure enough, we were about three
miles from it and I drove there. "What the hell do you want with a
place like this?" "I'm going to see if I can get my brass knuckles
bronzed," I grinned in reply. The shopkeep was a short man as round as
he was tall, balding, with round spectacles. He was quite friendly and
gentle, and I asked him how much he charged for bronzing. He told me
it depended on the item. I produced the brass knuckles and he managed
to say, "Oh my. No, we can't bronze that." "Why not?" "Well, it's
solid metal, and that metal's too thick to go into our machines, it
would ruin them. The machines, I mean. Sorry." "That's okay. You have
a good day." I turned and we walked out the door, leaving the man
there to jack off with the silver polish. We headed over to another
store what basically said the same thing. Heading off to a third
store, we were in for a surprise and an asshole. I came in and said
hello, and immediately I got "What do YOU want?" spat at me. I shot
him a queer glance, immediately getting that feeling about him (no,
NOT a hard-on). Asked him if he done bronzing before. Says yeh. Asked
him if he could bronze metal items. Asks what for. Tells him 'cos I
want something bronzed and it's metal. What kinda metal? Brass. Asks
if I have it on me. I produce it and slam it down on the table. I turn
to talk to Krista about what kind of an ass I'm dealing with. "Get the
hell out of my store!" I turned around slowly. "What was that?" I
growled softly. "I said take your stupid ass out of here before..."
"Before WHAT?" He stepped out from behind the counter and shook his
fist at me. "Before something gets broken?" I asked innocently,
putting my fist through a fake framed diploma on the wall with etched
glass on it, which shattered into a mess on the floor, dangled, then
fell, breaking itself in the fall, all without taking my eyes out of
contact with his. "I dare you to do that again..." I called over to
Krista. "Hey, start FSU." We had been discussing that not too soon
before in the car, stood for "Fucking Shit Up". Soon after a large
black-and-white framed signed Calvin Klein underwear ad (WTF??) flew
across the room and smashed against the door behind him. He jumped,
not having seen it coming, giving me a chance to snatch my knuckles
from the table. "I oughta pop you right in the teeth with these, you
bastard." He was looking like an extra right out of a film, his eyes
darting every five seconds to his far right, sidestepping slowly that
way with his hand extended. "Is that so?" He was out of my reach now
so I partook in FSU, smashing a couple more frames and shattering a
trophy cup and a punchbowl. "Yeah." His hand darted in behind an open
door and grabbed onto something and then came charging out with it. It
was a fucking broom. I guided it astray with my left hand and grabbed
onto it with my right, flipped it around and out of his hand, busted
it over my knee, and came at him with the broom end, flinging the
stick end through a window on the door that was open next to him. I
poked the bristles in his face and he screamed in pain. There's
nothing quite like getting a broom shoved in your face. Several
hundred sharp little points all pressing into your flesh, up your
nose, in your eyes, between your teeth, all over your face, and
pressing in a different direction each time. The bristles are stiff
and deliver a very effective blow, at once extremely confusing,
especially if you're hit fast as he was, and painful in a strange way.
And utterly nonlethal and completely unpredictable. It was nice. He
went down gripping his face, which (I have myself taken a broom in the
face before, I know how it feels) felt as if it was severely burnt,
and I clubbed him in the side of the head like shooting a hockey puck
with the edge of the half-broom and he fell over wincing. Krista was
having a fucking riot, tearing shit off the walls and slamming it
together, throwing things into the ceiling panels, one of which
disappeared, and she threw things into the hole, with her foot she
cracked up a plate-glass display window, had knocked over a table full
of crystal trophies, the place was a complete mess as we ran out of
it, got into the car and burned ten foot of rubber getting out of
there, swerving through traffic and laughing like very disturbed
people having a good time. I cranked up the stereo, which was
ironically playing something similar to getaway-car music (don't ask,
it came off the _Cheapo Crypt Sampler CD_, it was now that I look,
Nine Pound Hammer's "Runaway Train". The CD has the coolest fucking
introduction: "We're all going the same goddamn screw-America way!!
Hippies!" "Joe, Joe, do me a favor, give us all a break. (cash
register) Can it a while, huh? Here's a quarter, go play the jukebox,
okay?" "Uhhhgg..." "What's the matter, Joe, you got all those opinions
and you can't pick a record? Heh." "Look at this shit music. Goddamn
hippies, they even fucked up the music! I'd like to get my hands on
one of those little bastards, I'd kill 'im. I'd like to kill one of
'em. They're gettin' away with murder!" then it launches straight into
a New Bomb Turks song). After a while she asked me, "So what did we
accomplish back there?" "Well, I don't know specifically, but I do
know that _you have to destroy in order to create_." "How so? Not that
I doubt you, but really, how so?" I cracked a thin smile. "Remember
how SNAFU '99 got started? Remember how everything went in a pattern?
The abandoned ice-skating rink? The Waffle House? The Perfect Crime? A
henchman in a fur coat? All came from destruction, in the spirit of
destruction. And what did they create? Well, why do you remember them
so vividly? Think about that." "You seem to have a point. But why
drive to Mount Pleasant just to bury a bear alive?" "If that was
metaphor, it sucked." "Uh, never mind that, just slipped out." I drove
and said "Hee hee hee" into my liter bottle of carbonated drink. We
drove around a while, not having any particular destination, and
that's good practice sometimes, it tends to shake things off and open
doors for you. We got to talking at some length about what motivates
people to do things, a topic we both seem to be extremely well-versed
on. We got to talking about modes and acts of revenge when suddenly a
thought formed in my head. Most any criminal act can be committed out
of revenge, especially violent acts including suicide, larceny,
embezzlement, theft, even shoplifting and drug use, but one criminal
act stood out as unclassifiable, criminal enticement. Krista wasn't
very well-informed (hardly anyone but pigs and lawyers really ARE) on
exactly what that constituted, so I explained that criminal enticement
occurs in 99.999% of cases as a pretext to either sexual assault or
kidnapping, but when on its own exists when a person entices someone
else to join them geographically, especially if in a car. It is a very
strange law and fluctuates across the country. Most states only have
CHILD enticement laws, where it is a class five felony to entice a
minor by any means to get them inside a vehicle or a structure, but
some states including some of the larger ones like California and
Texas just have plain enticement as some type of felony. You can get
charged only if you have a witness testifying that they were unwilling
to join you until you enticed them, but after you enticed them it was
okay to join you by them. As I said, a very bizarre law. Now by
enticement itself, we're talking about basically any fucking thing you
can do or say which, in the eyes of the law (what are crossed in this
matter), gives another person some inclination to join you. You can
cajole them, offer them food, offer them sex, offer to blow up their
house, puke at their feet, grovel, or anything which another person
might construe as an invitation for them to join you. In Florida,
there is a misdemeanor offense for enticing crocodiles and alligators,
unless you are some type of person who normally feeds or cares for
them or an emergency worker ****_evacuating them from danger by
enticing them from their lairs_**** (!), and thus there is also a
loophole in the felony-punishable human-related criminal enticement,
in that, if you are a pig, a paramedic, a fireman, a member of the
armed forces or National Guard, or basically anyone else in uniform
probably including stewardesses but not mechanics because the
government is radically sexist and affirmative action made it so that
women always get out of the slammer and all mechanics go to jail for
spitting on the sidewalk, or if you are just an ordinary citizen who
had a rational basis for believing that by enticing this person you
were somehow removing them from danger what they could not escape by
themselves, you can't be convicted of enticement even with a witness.
The only leg the law has to stand on is the belief that if you go out
of your way to entice someone to join you, you intent to place them in
danger, which is incredibly nearsighted, but then again so are ALL
domestic laws, it's the same defense as speed limits have, that if
you're going at a velocity over thusandsuch you are either spiting the
law because they plant speed limit signs that you're supposed to know
are the law or are speeding away from the scene of a crime you
committed, it's just nonsense and of course the primary source of
funding for most city governments, so they've never been repealed
because no matter how high in the court systems you are, you started
down in city gov't, and you still believe the ideology that these
places need taxpayers' money. But that's a tangent. Now how could
enticement be a mode of revenge, if only used by itself, not in
conjunction with any other crime? That's the question I posed Krista,
and she paused for quite a while before firing back. We threw ideas
around for a half an hour and settled on the remote possibility that,
as in all the films, a criminal wishing to psychologically alarm
someone who is already aware of his existence might lure their child
into a car and talk with them for a few minutes, send it off again,
and later contact their parent displaying how easy it would have been
for him to do some other evil to the child and thus damage him. It's a
positively ridiculous scenario, but it's all we could come up with.
I'm sure Corey could do better, but he's off being someone's bitch and
unavailable for comment. We then discovered that the only crime
committed during the entirety of SNAFU '99 NOT having been conspired
to was in fact enticement, and I was the felon. I enticed seventeen
people, two of them minors (McKenzie and Sally, both 17), with
promises of a party and drugs and alcohol, but none of them would ever
possibly think of testifying this before anyone. I then suggested that
we go out and start committing this felony offense to random people on
the street, using the previously-purchased tapioca beads as a lure. I
imagined trying to offer tapioca beads with verve and flair and make
them enticing, and I just could not keep a straight face through it,
so we abandoned the project in fear that Mr. Murphy would step in and
guide us to a tapioca bead freak who'd rob us blind or shit all over
the car or something. Somewhere in the distance a lonely man rewound
his cuckoo clock. As Screw 32's "Misunderstood" came on the stereo,
Krista got an idea. I thought I had smelled something burning. It was
the fuse to her mind. Sparkling like a tornado in a glitter factory,
it had the power to brighten my day by a thousand suns once it burned
to the core. Explosive instantaniation, spontaneity unveiled and
inveigling. Such potential. "Suppose you sat there and went randomly
through all of those archived quotes in your head and spat out
selections from each." "Suppose I do?" "I wonder what it would sound
like," she intoned coyly, knowing she'd just won the war, "what it
would consist of, what it would sound like to another person, I
suppose something like having a huge radio band full of
perfectly-clear all-talk stations and slowly twisting the dial from
one side to the next and back again." There was a long pause. "Go on,
do it." She had gone all Low-Tones Jones on me and I was indeed
inveigled into trying this. Should be a good exercise to clear my
mind, now I'm glad I did it. I cleared my throat, stopped the CD, and
thought as loudly as I could, "_Focus!_" It was similar to an exercise
that the KGB had taught the FBI who taught the CIA who the NSA
eavesdropped it off of and used in which you sat in a darkened room
with a slide projector and a microphone, and the slide show was of
blurred faces of people of all types, from other employees to
communist leaders to ex-presidents to current suspects under
investigation and then there were still photos of geographical
locations taken at dusk often from a much different angle than anyone
would imagine the place from, such as No. 2 Dzheherinsky Square from
the southeast corner, and each image would stay on the screen for two
and a half seconds and would cycle once, then you'd be given the
lights and a packet containing different photographs of all those
people and places but there would be more photos in there than you saw
in the slideshow, a bunch of lookalikes, and you'd arrange the
photographs in order and match documents to them, really tedious but
it kept you sharp. I snapped back into focus and started grabbing
pieces of quotes then switching to other quotes as she busily wrote
them down. "You're not supposed to believe in me / you never did / I'm
thicker than god / let's get past who I am / Girls with curly hair /
Marvin watched the tachometer / spinning mildly into the dishwasher /
sharpened a stick using a hacksaw, knowing it could be done /
springboard into monotony / spell my name however you wish / you need
not be stimulated / Building character in the Moscow metro / avoid
doing paperwork altogether / can you name the seven dwarfs / vodka in
italy / clandestine horses beat the ground to death / monitor kills
merrimac / everybody limbo! / paperback, hardback, recliner, judge /
it's not who I am / it's what I do that / turns you and / the rest of
them on / with hearty, warm / syrupy emotions, no doubt / disinter the
priesthood / tell them there's a new sheriff in town / and the name
would be / how dare you? / guilty / if you feel you are not properly
sedated / contact me at / the sound of the tone the time will be /
out." That was getting easy. She remarked about a few things and I
flipped the stereo back on. "That was very interesting and properly
seductive. Let's get something to eat. "Roge-o," I sighed, "how about
Arby's? It's close." "Fine with me."

I drove over to the restaurant and parked, finishing a smoke before
entering the store. "You know, this is reminding me of the strangest
dream I had recently." "Tell me all about it," I said, suddenly
interested, after we had ordered. "Well, it started off really weird,
like some cruel sitcom or something. There were like fifty of us, all
punks of some type, and friends, too, many faces from SNAFU '99, but
we were all living in separate apartments in this huge U-shaped
intertwined multilevel complex of apartments on the east or west
coast, there wasn't any real outside footage so I can't be sure which,
but of course we were constantly over at one another's places getting
together. I... I can't really remember that much of what went on
there, but I do remember someone deciding to pull the cruelest damn
trick on you, it's really odd, like something off of that Melrose
Place show, hard to explain, like a sex scandal in the making, really
lame, something I'd never do, but I did it in this dream with this
girl who I have no idea who it is but we somehow managed to get you
alone, like inside an empty department store, like Ross or something
and confused you by both offering sex for the same time slot and it
worked and we both showed up and started getting undressed and you
were freaking out because you didn't know who to tell to go home and
you had the idea of taking both at the same time, heh, but you knew
you couldn't get away with that and you finally ended up telling this
other girl to go home and as a result we were both exiled from this
weird club-like atmosphere. Sound strange enough to you yet?" I was
enthralled. I love listening to dreams, they often say so much so
innocuously that they're positively revealing, but this one was just
intriguingly odd, and remarkable in that she remembered it so clearly.
"Uh, yeah, do go ahead, I'm starting to get a feel for what's going
on, keep explaining, take your time, I love dreams..." She ate some
and continued. "Well, the next leg of this dream was completely
different. Again a bunch of people, but people I didn't know, along
with you, Michael, and Autumn from the party, we were constantly
running around doing things at night, none of which I can remember,
but I can remember watching you running into the place where Michael
was staying and arguing with me to try to get back on my good side,
which I knew you were really on, but you didn't think you were and I
really took advantage of you, just wickedly playing with your mind,
but it wasn't a good feeling. Then Michael took off his shirt and shot
himself and we had to be pallbearers, that was really fucked-up, you
were wearing this white uniform and wouldn't talk to anyone, that
ended pretty quickly and everyone was normal again and we went to this
really strange event that was like an underwater rave, we were all in
a swimming pool, and this guy I seemed to know kept telling me about
it and he said something to the effect of, "The object of the game is
to dive feet-first onto other people's heads," and I was all for that,
but it ended up more like a water-aerobics class that they have for
senior citizens aboard cruise ships," at this point we both collapsed
in laughter thinking about it, and she went on, "and this black girl
standing next to you in the chest-high water kept trying to get you to
do this exercise where, at a certain beat in the weak music, you put
your hands above your head and dipped your index fingers down, and you
could never get the hang of it, and it amused me intensely..." "It
would me, too, though I'd be laughing at the situation rather than the
circumstances." "Anyway, this was somehow illegal and this kid named
Matt appeared, like eighteen, and told us all that the sheriff was in
the building and we didn't understand what a problem this was and
everyone was getting out of the pool and running out the door, and I
joined up with one of them but you just stayed put and they drained
the pool to get rid... of the evidence ..." she choked then on a sip
of soda laughing and took a while to recover, thinking. "Hey, take it
easy, don't kill yourself relating a dream, that would be a terrible
way to go..." "And you were kind of standing around while I was
standing freezing cold in a bathing suit, soaking wet, with three
other girls all scared to death, behind this huge black rock that was
like fifteen feet high and ten feet wide, surrounded by pristine
lime-green bushes and small trees, on soft bright grass, and we got
word that someone had scared the sheriff away and we slowly returned
to the place, which had transformed into something that looked like a
big walk-in bathroom with a huge counter full of sinks. You were
really worried that either I'd been arrested for something or I'd
taken advantage of the mayhem to run away from you and so when you saw
me at the door you ran up and kind of just picked me up and put me
back down on the other side of the room and we talked at length about
nothing, you know how in dream conversations you can spend like
fifteen minutes and not really say a word? Or is that just me, do I
have my dream sound muted or something?" "No, that's very common among
dreams. It draws from the fact that in real life you can spend
twenty-five YEARS speaking and still not say a damn thing, it just is
a device to pass the time while your brain does other things. Go
ahead, this is really getting interesting. I want to know what
reminded you of this." "I'm just getting to that, in fact. Be patient.
Well, after that we were two of like five people left in the place,
and the dream kind of drifted off, and momentarily we were happy
again, and just leaving a 747 with "Air Scandinavia" printed in red on
the side of it, but then the dream cut, and we were alone in the
middle of fucking Ireland. You were all excited and were smoking the
last of a generic-looking cigarette and you were about to toss it away
when you spotted, I swear I'm not lying here, in brown printing on the
white filter of the cigarette, the Arby's symbol, but not the name,
you know, that thing they have outside on the signs that looks like a
llama dick or something, and suddenly you got REALLY excited, and
pointed this out to me and then inspected the cigarette further and
saw the McDonald's logo on the other side, and you said, "It's
strange, it's sweet smoke like candy, but they sell it as fast food
stores, can you imagine how cheap they are? Let's go!" and I was
stoned or something, because I said, "Don't you think we need a car
first?" and you didn't have any money on you at all and said, "But I
don't have any money!" and I opened up my passport which was huge and
had a driver's license slot in it, and through the plastic you could
see a white credit card that had "USA" something printed on it, and
silver card numbers, and I removed this magical credit card and we
stood up and looked around. We weren't as deserted as we had thought.
To the southeast about three-quarters of a mile was a nice big black
asphalt highway with cars on it and on a grassy hill to the right of
that there was a park or something with a huge blue plastic skate
ramp, but inverted like a dome or some abstract art, and there was a
valley leading to the northwest again all just carpeted in lush grass
and scattered with big black rocks the same type as I had hidden
behind in that other part of the dream, and so we followed this trail
down and of course the dream cut and we ended up outside a huge old
pair of buildings, one of which was obviously a rent-a-car place and
the other which had a sign that read something like "electric
company", and like idiots, we followed the path to the electric
company, and outside, there were all of these show cars from the
fifties that looked like UFOs and other unstable artistic unworkable
flying machines. The last thing I remember from the dream is this big
elaborately-painted piece of sheet metal all bent at the corners and
decorated to look like one of those flying carpets, and it was sitting
on a kind of swivel base, and I flopped down onto it and pulled myself
up onto it and you joined me and we just laid there on our stomachs
face-down for the longest time, listening to the sheet metal sculpture
creak erratically in the wind, side-by-side but not doing anything.
Freaky, huh?" I took a deep breath and explained a few things to her.
"The reason you couldn't remember what any of the signs said was
because you cannot read in dreams, reading is controlled by a part of
the brain that shuts off during sleep. The reason the "Air
Scandinavia" and McDonald's signs were understandable to you was
because they were iconographically presented, that is, you had seen
them enough before like the title of a book that you could look at any
part of the word and know what it represented. The reason the dream
cuts in and out is because you are physically nodding in and out of
REM sleep, through no fault of your own. What usually controls that is
something that you hear like a dog howling outside or just a natural
sleep pattern. I'm not the best at analyzing dreams, but I did learn
something from it, and I simply cannot tell you what that would be,
because you already know it and it would sound so similar yet foreign
to you that your mind would reject it. I think it's wonderful that you
can remember that much of something SO forgettable as a dream,
something that ephemeral, and recall it. I'm telling you, just learn a
couple foreign languages, learn something about espionage, and I could
get you a hell of a nice job in the Agency." She laughed. "I keep
telling you, I'm not interested. Get the fuck out of recruiter mode.
You think I'm going to get in without some form of college degree?"
"If you don't want to continue college, I can still get you in. If you
want to continue, I could have them pay for it while you train or
before entering officially. And you could go anywhere you wanted." She
growled something fairly obscene. I giggled. "You just don't get it,
I'm not ready for any of that, even if I'd be good at it, I have no
fucking clue as to what I'd be doing, and besides, while I appreciate
the offer, I'm looking for something more domestic to do with my life
anyway. Not that it doesn't appeal to me, but haven't you said it's
basically the most boring job on earth?" "Well, it beats working in a
gas station, but yes, most of it is boring, but it sure pays a person
well for doing a lot of nothing." "Thanks anyway, but fuck off, if you
know what I'm saying. I can't stand being bored. That's why I'm still
wondering about the whole college bullshit. I'd always much rather be
out like I am now, enjoying myself, than stuck in some fucking
classroom, but I figure they should at least pay me for doing my own
thing. And no, I don't know to whom I am referring with that
statement, and yes, I know it sounds stupid, but I don't even have a
JOB, ahh, it's too confusing." I was offended. "Too confusing? For
someone who worked out of the Puzzle Palace for thirty-five years? I'm
sorry, but that's just not possible. Ever think of trying to get into
the military?" "Thought about it, but thought about it hard enough to
know that I just wouldn't fit in. It would be depressing and
monotonous living like that. It's human nature to want to succeed, and
that's all that's pushing me right now. No inspiration, no cause."
"The quintessential punk dilemma," I offered, finishing up my meal.
"Really? how did you come up with that?" "Well, in 1975, spray-painted
between the Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park tube stations in
London, it read, "SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY - TUBE - WORK - DINNER -
WORK - TUBE - ARMCHAIR - TUBE - WORK - HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE? -
ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP". In fact, John Lydon himself graduated high
school in '72, and desultorily pursued a higher education interspersed
with various dead-end jobs, in and out of college three or four times,
where he met Sid and others, and then got kicked out of the house for
chopping his hair off and dyeing it green, went squatting, and
consequently met almost everyone important to the uprisings of punk
rock. Similarly, there is a punk state of mind that's always conscious
of the inherest idiocy in the things that everyone else does as a
routine, such as going from high school to college to a career in your
field and all that bullshit, or such as giving a good fuck about the
insipid things that everyone else is doing, where they're going, and
how they're wasting away their youths in one way or several. I know
this attitude, I lived a goodly portion of my life listening to those
voices. Sometimes life just screws you, and when you're between the
ages of eighteen and thirty it screws EVERYONE in its own special way.
So you get dealt a bum hand. Get used to it. Life's far from perfect.
But, to interject a quote from the delightful film _Trainspotting_,
actually the introduction, "Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a
career. Choose a family, Choose a fucking big television, Choose
washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin
openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance.
Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home.
Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose
a three piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose
sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit-crushing game shows,
stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the
end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more
than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned
to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life. ... But why
would I want to do a thing like that?" You can draw your own
conclusions as to the implications for you from that, I know you can,
you have those skills. But you want MY take on this, my take from
fifty-six years of living on this rotten fucking backstabbing
praetorian blackguardly contemptible miserable sordidcontemptible
planet, you want the advice of someone who's lived through the shit,
dealt with it, avoided it, and fucked with it to the point where I
could TAKE from it more than I needed to enjoy it, been successful,
progressive, and all that horseshit? My advice to you is to do
whatever the fuck you like, enjoy yourself, have fun, do what seems
right to you, and, above all else, my classic phrase, which is
particularly applicable to someone in your state of stagnation and
indecision, "DO SOMETHING, EVEN IF IT'S WRONG!!!!" Because you don't
have time to fuck around and think logically about shit, that's never
gotten anyone anywhere. Don't think, just act. Do SOMETHING, even if
it's wrong! Because it doesn't matter one whit right now if it turns
out to BE wrong, because you are exempt from consequences because you
came from indecision which has no right and wrong and thus no
consequences. DO something, EVEN IF IT'S WRONG!! Because you're going
into war. What war, what war? What am I talking about? I'm talking
about the war that's going on everywhere, right outside your door. The
war that's going on in your head. You have no time to think or plan,
you just have to fucking charge out there and *DO SOMETHING, EVEN IF
IT'S WRONG!* You get what I'm saying?" She was speechless. Something,
I wasn't sure what, had hit her and smacked her mind a good one. Her
jaw was dropped, incredibly full bright red lower lip hovering just
over the tip of a straw jutting up from the table from an empty cup.
She blinked. She blinked. I was getting worried by now, there wasn't
much time left for her mind to hold onto the reaction. She closed her
jaw miraculously and sprang up from her chair, literally cast her body
across the table strewn with cardboard boxes which used to contain
food, cups filled with ice slowly melting into bad-tasting
cardboard-juice water, a metal napkin dispenser, and balled-up remains
of what used to wrap sandwiches. The table was four foot square, she
was five feet eight inches in overall length, and the distance from
where she had been to where I was was about four and a half feet. Her
chair clattered to the floor, no more useful than it had been before.
Then she impacted me, throwing her arms around my shoulders, knocking
me back into the padded back of the bench, and about a half-second
after that her body, from the knees up to the abdomen, crushed food
containers flat and her body slid on them like casters. Meanwhile, she
pulled herself in towards me with great strength, possibly fueled by
adrenaline, and rather violently delivered an overexcited, voracious
soul-kiss which lasted as long as the muscles in her back could keep
her upper body up at that height with the majority of her body on the
table. Hair flew between our faces. I brought up my right arm and
propped it up under her arm socket and then brought my left up and
cupped my beefy paw around the back of the top of her neck, having
slipped under her mass of dazzling hair to the recently-shaved back of
her head which extended up as far as it possibly could without
removing the lengthier hair and was full to the sides shaven. She
fired off a staring, immediate, riveting, resistless, piquant dekko of
a look drilling by fire through my eyes and into my mind, silently but
forcefully communicating things such as urgent need of something only
I could provide, captivation, relinquishment, exuberance, and a
blazing, unclassified but not generic _passion_. She had certainly
made a statement, and had succeeded in taking me by surprise, which
damn few people on this earth can claim. There was simply something
FERAL about the girl, there is no better word to describe it. She
intricately finished with the ceremony, backing out slowly and raking
my bottom lip a bit less than gently between her teeth until it popped
back into its original position, lingered, blinked long and hard for
about five seconds, reopened her eyes, and slid off the table to the
ground, having said nothing. I gathered the crap on the table up like
lightning onto a tray, popped it atop the other tray, rushed this to
the trash can, slammed the trays down on top of the can, and rushed to
meet her as she was walking out the second of the two entrance doors.
I could not form a single cohesive sentence that would not completely
understate the entire matter. I popped the alarm off, hustled over to
unlock her door and open it, and walked around and got in myself. "If
it weren't for people like you, people like me would not exist."
Cryptic, but understandable. My mind was racing. What was the proper
reaction to such an event? Rush to the nearest motel what charges by
the hour? Ask for her suggestion? Avoid asking of her suggestion as it
would be crude, because I'm supposed to know just what to do? Rush off
to an engraving shop and get a sign or a plaquard or a pendant done up
with those seemingly innocuous military/ironworker catchphrase words
imprinted into it? I just didn't know, and the thoughts were arriving
at light speed, barely enough time to categorize or remember any of
them singularly. I was not prepared for this situation. I did not know
what to do. Cursing myself for doing it, I sank temporarily back into
the role of a man whose job it was to make decisions on his feet
instantaneously that, if misjudged by even a fraction of meaning,
could cost a lot of people their lives including myself. This was
rather easy to accomplish, once you've LIVED it, you don't EVER forget
it. I decided to stall for time and do something equally spontaneous
in retribution and thus open myself to some sort of hint or allegation
from her as to what to do next. I put the key in the ignition but did
not turn it, instead I shifted powerfully in my seat and flashed over
and just licked the side of her face from the jawbone to the hairline,
almost the entire surface area of my tongue in contact with skin. I
then drew immediately back and internally cringed, hoping to hell
she'd say something giving me a hint as to what the hell it was I was
supposed to do. Of course in the eleven seconds between my action and
the relieving sound of her voice, my gears were cranking and I was
coming up with alternative ways to coax the information out, some of
which were patently stupid ideas. I had decided to wait twenty-five
seconds by my own count then start the car and just wing it. After
eleven seconds, though, as I said, a response came. "You're getting to
be close to being nervous. That's not at all like a professional.
Relax, let me figure out what's vexing you." Her voice had dropped to
a sultry drawn-out dripping quixotic tone. She lit upon an idea and
laughed softly, writhing slightly in the seat. "That's precious,
that's just fucking cute. Do you have in your mind the idea that I'm
expecting something specific? You're confused, aren't you? The only
thing on your mind right now is what to do for me, and I haven't even
asked you to do anything! Is that your problem?" I felt quite
relieved. "Yes. It is very stressful when one has absolutely no clue
as to what to do or where to go in a response to something as dramatic
and passionate as just occurred. I feel incomplete, as though I'm
missing a mental set of instructions for this type of scenario. Now
I'm going to do some high-stakes gambling here. I'm going to just ask
you, at the risk of losing the moment and the wonderful warmth
associated with it and even possibly turning you cold and embittered
against me for doing so, but I am going to ask you because I do not
know just what it is that I'm supposed to do now. I'm asking for your
guidance." She paused a moment, then cracked a smile like a whip, and
replied, "I'm not trying to be cryptic here, but TAKE YOUR OWN ADVICE.
The advice you just gave to me. Because, honestly, anything that you
were driven to do because of that incident HAS to be right. And
whatever you're about to do, I'll feel extremely safe and secure in
knowing that you're just going to prolong the magic of the moment
somehow, or in many ways." I gazed distantly at her, and wondered if
she could be correct. I went way out on a limb, like I always have
done and always will do when offered only a slight chance at success
or having been given the least assurance that I'd be able to get away
with SOMETHING not specified. I shifted in my seat and slowly lowered
myself sideways in the car on my back, over the console, and let my
head come to rest in her lap. I first took a deep longing breath in
through my nasal passages, allowing the absolutely intoxicatingly
seductive aroma produced there to clear my sinuses, clear my head,
erase all worries, redeem within me a perfect equilibrium, and
temporarily lend me a soul, something that normally I do not possess,
something I was born without the normal burden of. So strong was that
wholly natural and incredibly stimulating aroma that my mind flipped
over several times, giving me the absolute polar opposite of a
headache. My eyes drooped shut and I could feel my body glowing in
response to the supreme air I was now breathing, and after about a
minute once I was almost again mildly aware of my surroundings and
able to produce cognizant thought I spoke soft and low endearingly to
her, not opening my eyes but just speaking. I told her that I was
about to inform her of a special gift that she had which she shared
with only twenty percent of all females worldwide, something that,
while it may at first sound crude depending upon your upbringing and
how you view the issue as a member of the opposite sex, should be
taken as the ultimate compliment. I sighed and started with a brief
history of how I discovered this, including my extensively keen
personal interest in the subject, which for now I did not reveal, and
without saying anything blatant about what I had and had not
experienced before in this as-of-yet-unspecified area, gave her an
idea of how I'd come to know so much about it. I then rather
technically and blatantly, flatly, almost, explained what this
category was in as gentle a way as I could put it. Her eyebrows lit up
as it but slowly sunk in, slowly enough for me to proceed with my
explanation and get it all out before she put it all together
mentally, though I quite expected a slap in the face once it did sink
in. I then read off the memorized medical report concerning the fact
that twenty percent of women possess a certain gene in their genetic
makeup which controls something like a switch enabling them, however
involuntarily, to produce a dramatic excess of what the report labeled
as "feminine odour", which, I told her flat-out, we all know is a
bullshit term for The Aroma Of The Spice Of Life Itself emanating from
two distinct regions around the crotch area which I outlined for her
with a finger. I then told her that to me, it was absolutely the most
captivating, alluring, becoming, potent, intoxicating, and
wonderful-above-all-else sensory experience that I have had the
privilege of encountering. I then tersely explained that the
naturally-produced mixed chemical, hormonal, pheremonal, and
fragrential essence had an absolutely remarkable staying power, that
is, anything in near or direct contact with the aforementioned and
surrounding areas, everything at all porous, especially fabrics but
not excluding wooden chairs and the like, would absorb and hold the
scent, which has not yet degraded or faded that much, for periods of
time up to four or even six weeks, depending upon the intensity of
activity performed on that article and also the length of exposure.
Dropping away from the more technical and boring aspects, I went on to
mention that each person can be in a way identified by that particular
scent, and in my capabilities, whenever I catch the lingering sweet
earthy brazen tones of that awesome scent I am reminded very fondly of
her and it induces longing and a sort of nostalgia. Now, the scent
would be technically classifiable as distinctly sexual, but to someone
who knows enough about it, like myself, the images it conjures up are
very rarely sexual in nature and thus it is not in the least bit a
perverse act to go sniffing around for flashbacks of a better time
that will be had again and surpassed the next time. I closed by
describing in intricate detail how I would describe her unique aroma,
what specific effects it had on me (some of which surprised and
intrigued her), how I personally felt about the matter in general and
to a few specific key questioning points, and finally reminded her
about how this was a blessing and how if anyone who was lucky enough
to have it considered it a curse, how completely fucked-up their
thinking, upbringing, and personal maturity would have to be, how it
might be used, and my final words were, "I am now fully prepared for
you to slap, batter, cut, stab, shoot, pummel, bend, fold, spindle
and/or mutilate me in the false assumption which may well be real to
you that I am in fact a positively inhuman creature with such
outstandingly perverse views of the world and the brass balls to
announce them to someone's face when in fact all I was doing was
finally gathering up the courage and finding what I believed to be the
perfect time to go ahead and tell you what I had been dying to inform
you of since a little while after I first met you, and if you'd like,
right now I can quickly remove the magazine from my pistol and eject
the round in the chamber, throw them in the back seat, and remove any
other weapons on me you fear I might use against you which you really
should know better about." I gasped for breath and awaited cruel
retribution borne of misunderstanding, but did not receive any.
Instead, she just laughed, a truly wonderful sound, laughing heartily,
a sound that should be kept in the National Archives for its pure,
red-blooded, rubicund, hale and earthy sound. She shook her mass of
bronzed hair and turned her head down towards me. "First of all, I'm
not offended. I rather like it myself, but you seem on the brink of
obsession, which... no, it really doesn't at all. I was going to say
that it concerns me, but no, it doesn't. Could you explain?" I
explained to her that I had a lifetime membership in the American
Cunnilinguistic Association, Local 454, and we had meetings every
month in which we discussed pressing issues going on in society, which
appears to be headed towards making every crotch hospital-sanitized
and is ashamed of personal odour and on the whole cannot appeciate it
at all and the vast majority of those who can only appreciate it in a
slight and narrowminded degree, applying it only to sexual behaviour.
We have all sorts of activities and thirty-two percent of our
particular organization are straight women. Due to the, sigh,
"graphic" nature of some of the more blatant visual references we use
for lectures and other educational purposes, our membership is open to
anyone above the age of eighteen, though most of us are significantly
older than that. We discuss topics of interest to the group, we don't
volunteer to share memoirs of personal sexual experiences, that would
violate our charter, and we have over three hundred individual
organizations like ours across the US and Canada, we have a huge
support base, as well as the ACA, the American Cunnilinguistic
Association, which is the masthead of each of our multi-state
branches, and we get donations and hold public services and lectures
and even sell some literature to raise money to fund cutting-edge
scientific research into fingerprinting" scents, we're launching a
program by which volunteers can donate scents to be preserved,
cultured, catalogued, and so forth for later analysis and
distribution, offering each donor discreetly the option of, for a
nominal fee, her own personal reports and sealed, bottled
genetically-grown but chemically identical amounts of her extract for
personal use, after we did a survey and discovered to our surprise
that people were actually interested in this, we also fund boycotts
and some sketchy legislative action against such products as our
Public Enemy No. 1, a product called "FDS", or "feminine deoderant
spray", one of many products designed to help this fucked-up
scent-fearing society to easily and cheaply mask, alter, prevent, or
reduce natural scents such as these. I could go on forever, but I've
already gone on too much. We have extensive libraries of INCREDIBLY
hard-to-find back issues of medical reports from around the world from
a huge number of publications with articles about topics concerning
us, books, multimedia, shit like that, and we photocopy lectures and
articles and learn all about this type of thing. I've been learning
about it officially since 1958, and, I just have come to know a hell
of a lot about the subject." She soaked this all up. "What I don't get
and what you haven't answered yet is WHY you have this obsession with
the female genitalia and associated scents. I know it can't be common,
because odour has even been turned into an insult and a way of
'classifying' promiscuous women, and I know a lot of guys who think
the whole idea's gross, so what made YOU so open-minded, why the
fascination? I've never met anyone quite like you, as I've told you
before." "And as I responded before, "I can believe that." Well, this
is awkward for me to explain, because the only terminology I can use
is either "obsession" or "fetish", and both of those words are so
loosely-defined that they can instantly degrade meaning and intent,
so, to preface this, I'm going to use the "fetish" word to describe
it, and this does not imply anything other than a strong and extremely
compelling fascination with the subject over a long period of time and
does not signify obsessive, ritualistic, or any other sort of freakish
behaviour or attitudes towards the subject. Just to... Do you mind if
I do something real quick, it'll only take a second and it'll allow me
to be professional about this, just real quick...?" She nodded and
said, "Sure, go ahead. I'm more interested in all of this than you
were with my weird dreams." I got up out of my laying position and
yanked a huge hardbound dictionary out of the backseat in the
literature section, from which the Yellow Pages came, as well as the
road atlas, the White Pages, my personal emergency contact book, my
little black book, two expensive blank white ruled legal pads (made of
virgin unrecycled paper, as with ANY paper I agree to use) for
writing, and a few novels and assorted items of literature. I quickly
thumbed through the dict. and located the word. "Okay, here's the
official definition of the word "fetish", it means no more and no less
than this: "any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning reverence,
respect, and/or devotion."," I repeated the definition to ingrain it
in her mind, and continued, "notice it says nothing about freakish
behaviour, unnatural, deviant, or excessive behavioural alliances or
psychological deviancy from the norm." "Okay, I got it, the word
simply means "any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning
reverence, respect, and/or devotion." That's the way I'll always think
of the word. Now, PLEASE, go on." "All right. As sexual awareness
increases in a person and when access to more or less full visual
representation of the body of (usually) the opposite sex becomes
available, more often than not through the wonderful realm of
pornography, certain mixed genetic and individual-taste
predispositions toward either certain parts of the body, certain
actions of the body, certain states of various parts of the body,
certain sizes, shapes, and even colours, all of which are the body's
natural reactions to being sexually stimulated, begin to take
precedence over just plain nudes, for example, the fucking tit freaks
like hardened nipples, or puffy ones, some strange people get fetishes
about body parts not even entering into the sex act, such as the foot
fetishists, some people go for insertions of objects or body parts
into orifices, and the like. Myself, I have always fetishized the
female genitalia. Associated subfetishes for me would be spread,
messy, wet, and I even take interest, though of a much lesser
intensity, on oversized clits. Basically, anything to do with the
female genitalia gets me both sexually aroused as well as intensely
interested and almost studying and comparing and the like. And no, I
can't get enough of any of it and I have a huge collection of what I
feel to be the very best of what's out there that I use, more often,
in fact, for research and digital manipulation than for
self-gratification, which does in fact occur from time to time, and
incredibly often during certain times. But that's an aside. How
cunnilingus got into the center of the picture was the simple fact
that it would be the most up-close-and-personal way of really getting
to know the area, and at that point I already knew about the scents
but of course hadn't experienced them and longed to, to the point
where it was the first thing I checked out the first time I got a
piece of ass. The exact same goes with the fluids, which goes back to
the wetness subfetish. As I became more and more personally familiar
with the female genitalia in the flesh, the more I learned that there
was nothing I could do more gratifying than going down on a girl and
suddenly opening up the treasure chest of sensory experiences, each
one almost completely different than the next, and believe me, to me
absolutely nothing is taboo, and I was fortunate to meet the right
people and do enough experimentation to prove my theory that what I
had been looking for and at for so many years was indeed the best of
the best for me personally. But as I said, it's not ALL sexual. That's
really more of an introduction to a fetish. As the definition
suggests, there is adulation, reverence, respect, devotion,
curiousity, intense interest, and a desire to gain more knowledge
about just exactly what it is from all possible angles. This is
research, mainly, and I can literally drum away hours like nothing
consumed in some facet dealing with the female genitalia because it is
my fetish, really my only one. What do I research? Anything I can
find. Acidity of different fluids discharged during copulation,
cosmetic surgery designed to enhance or fix up problems in the
genitalia, average sizes of _labia minore_ and _labia majore_ in
people of different cultures, anything you can possibly imagine. It
all sounds tremendously perverted, doesn't it?" "Actually, not at all,
the way you describe it. And, I'll tell you something I hadn't planned
on letting slip, I was hoping that you'd make it SOUND perverted so it
would be harder for me to believe. But I guess it's a hobby of sorts,
and I sure wish on behalf of the female community that more people
were like yourself, because there really are so few truly good and
devoted cunnilinguists in the world, in my experience and from people
I've spoken with, most males are flat boring in their selection of
sexual techniques, just trying to get their cock in and out of
whatever they can cram it into, you know, that gets old and it's
nowhere near as personal or in most cases as fulfilling as simple
cunnilingus, not to even MENTION the ideas you seem to get. So I have
a few questions that I hope you don't mind answering. The first one is
not really a question but a command, put the fucking dictionary back,
turn around, lay back, and enjoy yourself, I KNOW you'll be giving me
straight answers, but i KNOW as well that you'll be a lot more willing
to give them and you'll be a lot more comfortable giving them when
you're close to something that obviously makes you so giddy." Without
a second's hesitation I slammed the dict. back in its spot, swivelled,
and slowly lowered myself back into the heady miasma and galvanic
warmth and closeness of the human lap-pillow. "Please, continue, I'll
be happy to answer anything." She adjusted the position of my head
blatantly. "Well, first question is that, while you are down there,
which of those two modes you described are you in? Sexual arousal or,
if it's even possible, the 'research' mode?" "Ah. I neglected to
mention something. There is in fact a third state that doesn't occur
that often, which is probably why I omitted it. What I'm in now is a
mixture of all three, I'd say about twenty percent arousal, fifteen
percent research, and sixty-five percent elation. The elation state
occurs for me when I am experiencing parts of what make up my fetish,
but not anything like sexual arousal. For example, sniffing well-worn
underwear, or laying in my bed which you REALLY saturated in more ways
than one, immersing myself in the various scents of what happened
then, and thinking about not the action so much as what made the scent
so strong, I've resolved never to wash those bedclothes until the
scent is very clearly gone, or, hypothetically, receiving a donor's
bottle of ejaculate, more wonderful than the most expensive bottle of
wine anyone can find anywhere, things like that, they immerse me in
certain parts of my fetish and lead to complete elation, hence the
name. That answer it okay?" "More than well enough. Second, now this
may come off as strange and probably offensive, but remember I don't
know. What about animals? I mean, does female horse genitalia get you
excited or anything like that?" "No, not really. It's the aesthetics
that I know the most about and I come into contact with 99% of the
time what gets me going. Animal genitalia is structured much more
differently and only remotely resembles what I'm used to. The
construction is the key, and I much prefer human. Good question,
though." "Okay, well, uh, that pretty much wraps it up, and thanks so
much for sharing. Really, I had no idea about any of this, it really
took me by surprise. But I'm into it. I'm certainly not disgusted,
appalled, horrified, sick, embarassed, or suspicious, in fact it's a
strangely good feeling knowing so intimately what it is you have a
thing for and I'm glad to know I'm among the elite twenty-percenters,
kinda makes me feel special. I don't really know how to put it in
words, but really, thanks for completely blowing my mind open to all
kinds of things I never would have thought about if it hadn't been for
this conversation. There's no sense in you getting up until we've
figured out what to do next, so relax, let the, err, creative juices
flow, as it were..." I laid there and said "Hee hee hee" into the most
pleasant air around me.

Krista was silent for the longest time, the only movement, even, came
when she fired up a smoke and rolled the window down. The ethereal
currents and drafts swirling and radiating around me fluctuated
perfectly smoothly and my head sank down between her inner thighs and
the warmth against the back of my head combined with the slight,
steady momevent of her breathing did consciousness in and I sunk into
a very deep and incredibly pleasant slumber for about twenty minutes
as she occasionally wove her fingers through my hair idly. I awoke of
my own accord and smiled up at her. "The idea... Came to me in a
half-dream I just had... This lap is a hotbed of ideas just waiting to
be unleashed. And I'm sure I don't fully know its power yet. You're
going to like this, trust me." I picked myself up slowly from her lap
and started the car, driving towards a certain section of suburbia. It
would take a while to get there. I relaxed and thought about the two
of us. Here we were, two punks pursuing life along the jagged highway
of lost returns, sixty-five mile an hour speed limit and every twenty
feet there's a speedbump in the highway. But it felt as smooth as
glass. Out the windscreen we both noticed a tall, thin black man with
a Santa Claus hat on emptying a truly massive amount of ice into a
small galvanized dented trash can on top of a buch of dark green bags.
This elicited laughter from us. We were a giggly twosome, one being a
half-step from the nuthouse and the other floating over it throwing
eggs. We passed the man and continued down the road to somewhere. It
could be said of either of us that we smoked like a bishop and were
generally unconcerned about potential side effects from excessive
drinking and drug use. But we didn't really care, now did we? I was a
man of many latent words, blurred lines, violent mischeif, deep
thoughts, effervescent status, prolonged demeanour, predatory hunger,
bad blood and kitchen matches. She was a young thriving struggling
girl, strikingly beautiful yet quick-tempered and downright
balls-to-the-wall demented when it came down to the grit between her
fingernails and cuticles. She was, like so many others, lost, and I
felt it only fair to give her a life that I had no real use for
anymore. She was a stunning maverick and I liked that. We were thrown
together not so much by Fate (a caped gentleman with a limp) as by
complimentary circumstances, and had bonded into a singular unit of
cohesive disaccord and wanton acts of boss amusement, straying
deliberately off the beaten path on a fairly regular basis to pull the
plug on America's cities and throw a stout wrench into the mechanisme
of the general population. Not rebels. Not slavedrivers. Not
dogsledders. Not culpable. Not employees or students of anything but
chaos, of which we were merely instruments though not tools as most
who claim to be really are. Not anything specific, nothing you could
pin down, but an ever-changing relaxed medium roaming freely to wreak
and tweak and fight and fuck and leave our mark, pass our judgements,
collect the check and get the Dodge out of hell (literally). We're
here doing what we're doing because of such things as people who make
a career out of driving a fucking schoolbus, because, to them,
"Somebody's got to do it," and it might as well be them. We're here
because society (nameless assholes) dictates that there should not BE
people like us doing the things that we DO because it might upset the
miserable fucking lives they've set themselves up to fail in over and
over, from cradle to grave every step they make is a mistake and we
refuse to cooperate with, much less bow down to such a nonextant
self-proclaimed authority and moral and ethical bodyguard AS society,
which is doomed. We're not here to change anything or anyone in any
way whatsoever or to bring attention to some pitiful fucking 'cause'
or to sell something or to prove anything to anyone, we're not here
because our ideology dictates us to be, we have none, we're here
because we want to be here and it seems a lot of people have a PROBLEM
with that, but it's their own fate they're sealing by making that
known to us. You're not breaking the law unless you attract some
attention doing so, it's that simple. We're not criminals. Criminals
always make mistakes. I know how to do most anything without making
mistakes, attracting attention, leaving any evidence, or running much
of a risk of anything because I'm a professional. We don't have
anything to lose. We push the limits to our desires. We TAKE from life
unique experiences and memories to entertain us in the future. We're
completely self-sustaining. But is there a point to all of this
horseshit? NO. And that's the way we like it.

We reached the huge suburban sprawl as the sun was setting and I
started staking out areas looking for a particular feature that I knew
I would find somewhere in this area. I took everything sequentially,
driving down the first main road, taking each sidestreet (or rather
cul-de-sac, in about 60% of cases) and covering one side, turning
around, then scoping out the other. A nauseatingly monotonous process
is the stakeout. We had hit five main drives, about a hundred and
twenty individual homes, and were about to have to go to NVGs because
of the level of light when I spotted one of what I was looking for.
This was an eerily, spookily quiet and seemingly abandoned
cross-section of suburbia. It was a medium-sized housing development
of only about two hundred and fifty homes, meaning each home was very
well separated from its neighbour, and, as an added bonus, there were
plenty of large deciduous trees ranging from about twenty to seventy
feet high, all easily climbable, and remarkably dense, as if this part
of town had been built in the middle of what used to be a small forest
which had to have been absolute fucking HELL to contract this many
homes and streets and pipes and gas and sewers and buried phone and
power cables, there were no high wires through a fucking forest, it's
never as simple as just clearcutting what you have to build over,
trees generally have large bases (no I will NOT say the "t-word")
which extend the roots quite miserably deep into the ground, which is
usually soft for only half of the length of the tree root base, you
have to try everything to get all that shit out, burn it out, blast it
out, manually pick it out, make hundreds of large ragged holes in the
ground with a power shovel which you later have to fill with a
concrete-like substance to make sure the ground doesn't shift and tear
the road or foundation of a house clean apart, it amazed me how anyone
had the balls or the lack of brains to build this sunset community.
But it had been here for fifteen years or so, it would have been a
crappy place to live, because C-470 comes within a half-mile of an
entire row of back houses, it's thirty miles to the nearest general
shopping district which is difficult to get to anyway from the few
roads that lead to the place, it's not big enough to warrant its own
grocery store or even a butcher shop, just a post office, not even a
friggin' gas station, at least not that I could find. But if you knew
the routes you could get to the grocery store in only fifteen minutes,
as well as lots of fast-food restaurants, office supply stores (FOUR
OF THE MOTHERFUCKERS, ALL WITHIN THREE-QUARTERS OF A MILE OF ONE
ANOTHER!!), a well-sized commercial district on the far end of the
section in which I used to work, and other amenities, but while it was
a "planned community", it was NOT a "WELL-planned community". The
house nearest to and probably owning the little item that you don't
commonly see that much of anymore was a good four houses down, and
there were only seven houses on the cul-de-sac. I decided to park
inconspicuously about sixty yards from the object (I will reveal
shortly what it is, I know this is annoying) on the street on opposite
side of the house nearest to it. This would accomplish a few very
important things: 1. It would not make the presence of anyone who's
not supposed to be there (i.e. us) known to anyone who might be
concerned as the car was hidden from their view, 2. In the unlikely
event that we were discovered, which would be awkward indeed, we would
not be able to be boxed in by a mob of people (unlikely), pigs' cars
(even more unlikely considering the pigs we'd be dealing with would
take a half-hour to get there no matter if there was mass murder going
on, and for a call like this would be, they'd REALLY take their time),
line-of-sight gunfire (incredibly fucking unlikely, and from where I
would be I could EASILY take out attackers, at least the ground-based
ones, with pistol fire, it would be dark, you cannot shoot accurately
by holding a flashlight in one hand, I have incredible night vision, I
would be equipped with nine-thousand-dollar
unavailable-to-anyone-but-special-forces-and-HRT-or-NSA TNVGs which
would make absolute blackness easier to see and aim and take targets
with than normal unaided daytime vision, but as I said not even a
remote fucking possibility, but, hope for the best, prepare for the
worst), my location would protect me from severely-unlikely trained
attack dogs, or most anything else but helicopter gunships and
tactical assault teams, which are beyond ridiculous to even devote an
ounce of thought to, and 3. We'd have a brisk jog to get to the car
but from there it was all open, two turns and we could effectively
disappear. I mentally photographed the surroundings in case it wasn't
easy finding the road where I was planning on parking, and drove off
only to find I had very much wasted that thought, as the road was
blatantly easy to find. I drove up and parked the car and finally
explained to Krista what was going on. First we got out of the car, I
popped the trunk open and removed the lightweight, no-bulk TNVGs, shut
the trunk, and leaned back against the car and grabbed Krista over
with me. I pointed out a certain tree, approximately fifty feet in
height, with a large crotch of branches about twenty-five feet up in
which something large could barely be made out, like a satellite dish
enclosure or something. She spotted the tree and I told her to keep
looking at it, about 25 feet up, right in the middle section of the
tree. "Do you notice anything different about this tree from all other
trees?" "Yeah, there's something stuck in it, looks like the box a
refrigerator came in or something. What the hell is it?" I barely
avoided laughing at what I was about to say. "It's our penthouse suite
for tonight. Here, put these on, I'll help you. They're very expensive
tactical rangefinding night-vision binoculars, some of the best optics
in the world and the world's most advanced and clearest night vision
electronics. Let me adjust this quickly to fit your face... You should
be seeing now as if looking through normal low-powered binoculars, so
most everything will be black, that's about to change..." I flipped
the unit on and immediately she began looking around the newly-lit
world. "Ghrist, this is amazing, like a thousand times better than
what I was looking through on your roof, every tiny detail is visible
and in perfect contrast. What am I looking at again?" "Sixth tree from
the side of the house, towards the right, the only one with a huge
structure sitting in its crotch, you know, where the branches split...
See it?" Yeah, but it's a ways away. You said these were binoculars?"
"Yep. Here, give me your right hand, extend your first two fingers,
I'll place them on the buttons. The big buttons, not the smaller ones.
There you go. Real easy to get to, it has a mechanical zoom with an
automatic focus, the front button, the one your middle finger in on,
zooms in. The button has three steps to it, you can feel them when you
press it, the first only requires a light but positive touch, and
zooms in very slowly. Push a little harder and the second zoom speed
kicks in, it's about the perfect one for you to use here. If you push
really hard on the bugger, it zooms in like NOW. Same deal with the
back button, what your index finger is on, play with it a few seconds
to get the hang of it, you'll find it's incredibly ergonomic." "You
ain't a-woofin! This thing seems to have been made for me personally!
Is there no limit to the zoom? I can see clear across to the backs of
those houses there, and I'm zoomed in on an individual tile on the
fucking roof, I could count the little grains of sand or whatever is
on there! The magnification increases along with the zoom?" "Yeah.
What you're seeing now would be almost invisible to the naked eye in
full sunlight, it's about six hundred yards out. Oh, why don't you
tell me how far it is? Between those two zoom buttons is another
button, each time you push it it gives you a different digital
readout. It tells you the distance of the object you're currently
focused on in feet, yards, and meters, then it gives you a digital
compass readout of the direction you're facing, precise to the degree,
push it again and it will track the speed of the object you're focused
on by a laser system, that's a cool function, push it again and I
think it gives you a menu where you can manually select a host of
different options, things like optional data arrays, the loudness of
the headphones for communications and if you have the parabolic
microphone, which can be programmed with a push of a button to
automatically focus its distance of where it picks up sound from
according to where you're zoomed in, and you can do literally hundreds
of things from that menu, most of which I have no need for, but you
can tweak the entire set using that menu, push it again and it goes
back to a clear screen." "Well, that tile, or maybe a different one, I
kind of lost track of it, at high magnification you always get major
shakes and jars according to how much you move the scope, anyway, one
of those tiles is exactly 581.322 yards away, so you were pretty
close." "Okay, back to the target. Remember where it is?" "Yeah, hang
on, sixth tree to the right of the house, got it. Is there any way to
manually control the magnification? It gets pretty shaky when it's
zoomed in real close." "Yeah. On the left side of the helmet there are
two identical buttons in the exact same place. They control
magnification. Or you can let the computer decide on the perfect
magnification depending upon the size, speed, and light refraction of
your target and according to where you currently have it zoomed in.
That's the middle button, that's all it's programmed for. Push it and
the computer does a hell of a lot faster and more precise job of
ranging things out for you, push it again and you're back to manual
control." She played with this for a little while, then went ahead and
let the computer do it for her. She reported to me what she thought
she saw in the crotch of the tree. "Okay, it's a wooden structure, I'd
say about fifteen feet wide in both directions, and seven feet tall,
though I'm not sure because it has an actual sloped gazebo roof on it,
I'd swear I was seeing part of the house but I can just SEE better
than that. It appears to be nailed together and painted over, I can't
see that much because there are these damn leaves, let me move around
and get a better view..." I stopped her in her tracks. "We can fix
that, too. Feel around about a half-inch above the center of the zoom
controls, you're looking for a knob, a dial, it's fairly good-sized,
there, you got it. Twist the knob in the conventional direction like
you were turning on a stove. keep focused on your target, though. What
you're doing is turning on a special variable-power infrared beam,
which is like a spotlight for night-vision equipment. It's invisible
to the naked eye and is actually more a type of heat than light,
allowing it to actually penetrate relatively thin annoyances such as
leaves and also light up your target and its surrounding area like
someone turned the friggin' Bat-Signal lamp onto it. Turn the dial up
as far as you want, the more you turn it up the more powerful the beam
will be and you should easily be able to find a happy medium for you
personally where there's not TOO MUCH light to the point where things
are out of contrast but those leaves and even thin tree branches will
blend completely out of the picture because the light is bending
around them. If you wanted to see the leaves themselves, you'd turn it
to a very low power. Let me see where you've got it cranked up...
Yeah, that should be just about right. How much of the structure can
you see?" "A hell of a lot more than I was seeing before, that's for
damn sure. In fact I can make out the entire building. What do you
want me to do?" I grinned. "Well, first describe to me in as much
detail as you can what you can see about the structure, absolutely
everything, and then think about what it might be and give me your
best guess at the end of it all of what that strange thing might be."
I secretly hated leading her on like this, part of me wanted to just
flick off the NVGs and say, "It's a big fucking treehouse and that's
precisely what we're going to use it for," but she was experiencing
something few people ever get to do, and truly I think she could not
figure out what it was, and this fact slightly amused me. She listed
off various aspects of the architecture, told me the floor was
cross-reinforced, it had two extremely thick probably plate-glass
windows designed to look like miniature normal house windows with
white trim, one of the windows was not visible because a cute little
miniblind apparatus of sorts had been hung there and lowered, it
looked upon closer inspection to be very dirty canvas, using her
rangefinder cleverly from one corner to the other of the floor she
subtracted mentally and confirmed that the floor was precisely sixteen
feet square, the walls and roof were about three-fourths of an inch
thich, probably some sort of wood though because they were painted she
culd not at any resolution make out any definite woodgrains, she noted
that there were a few small objects inside, that the entire structure
was overly-well secured to the tree with large iron support braces
underneath, eight bolts that were two inches in diameter secured to a
plank on the inside of the wall facing the main trunk of the tree,
five half-inch-diameter vinyl-insulated lengths of aircraft cable
srtung through a series of eye bolts on every major piece of the
entire structure, and bolts securely fastened through walls and floors
covering almost every inch of where the structure came in contact with
or came near any branch of the tree, looks like it was designed for
some kind of heavy storage, but of WHAT? She was puzzled. She suddenly
spotted, off of a reflection made possible only by the IR spotlight, a
crystal-clear image of the backside of the tree, leading up to the
structure was a metal-reinforced ladder, wider than usual, and with
steps instead of rungs, steps about a foot and a half wide and at
least three and a half feet long, sectioned to make it easily ascended
by anyone, there was no power to the "shed", as she was calling it,
and no light fixtures, heating, air conditioning, fans, obviously no
water or utilities like that, but she did see a can of Slice soda on
the sill of one of the windows. Concluding her observations, she
thought hard about what it was, what purpose it served. "Since there
is nothing in it but an amorphous plastic object and a can of soda, it
cannot really be a storage shed, and anyway, it would not be practical
to build a storage shed in a tree unless you happened to be a hunter
and lived in an area where there were bears, in which case it would
have been a large metal freezer, but it was open at both ends with
what appeared to be a curtain serving as a door on either side, but I
only caught a glimpse of that and can't confirm it. The only other
possible alternative would be a kids' treehouse, though it almost
seems too large and industrially-made for such a purpose, and quite
high in the tree to fall from. But that's all I have to go on, and I'm
going to go with my best guess, which is that it is a treehouse built
for either adolescents or even adults. NOW FUCKING TELL ME WHAT IT
IS!" I laughed. "It's a treehouse, all right. A nice, secluded private
space to ourselves for as long as we uh require it, and it's a good
sixty feet away from the house where the other dense trees will serve
to buffer out both sound and vision of anyone in the house closest to
it, the next-closest house being over a hundred yards away and
separated by enough foliage that I doubt they could hear a gunshot
from the treehouse over there, much less HOPE of even seeing it, MUCH
less IN it. Are you up for it?" She removed the goggles and handed
them to me and I quickly shut them off. "You're suggesting that we go
up there and make the beast with two backs in that treehouse?
Twenty-five feet off the ground on a piece of someone else's property?
In a TREE? Knowing full well that there could be people in the house
to discover us? ... I love it. But where are we going to put our
clothing? There won't hardly be room in the treehouse, much less the
room to get garments on and off. I'm not getting a bad feeling about
this at all yet, don't misunderstand ... me...*sniiiiifff*.....what
the hell smells exactly like the Miracle-Gro section of K-Mart around
here? Do you get that?" I sniffed at the air. Yep, she was right, she
pinned down that scent absolutely drop-dead perfectly, the section of
K-Mart (the indoors part, not the outdoors part) where Miracle-Gro
plant food, especially that particular brand of bagged fertilizer, is
stacked for sale. It couldn't have been fertilizer, because we were
standing on asphalt and for about eighty yards in all directions was
basically dirt and a few lichen-like plants and patches of crabgrass
and weeds, lots of weeds, and nobody would apply plant food,
fertilizer, or anything except Ortho to an area like that, because you
CAN'T make the fucking trees grow with it, and I knew what Ortho
smelled like, it was a very-greasy-acidic-chemical scent, nothing like
the very dry and pale scent we were describing, but the scent then
passed as if it had been ashamed that we were aware of its existence
and shuffled off into a closet somewhere to die in the mothballs.
"Umm, anyway, two things: YES, I realize that you're slightly
apprehensive about falling half-naked twenty-five feet out of a
child's treehouse, but NO, you know there must be a way around this,
an easy one, probably, and thus you are not yet put off of or by the
idea. Second, I have already solved this problem of not having the
space to store clothing, much less remove clothing, inside the
confines of the child's-treehouse-soon-to-be-love-shack-of-sorts. What
we'll do is after I've scoped out the house to see if there's anyone
at all in there, awake and/or alive at least, which I get the feeling
we lucked out on because of the lack of lights on, and once we've
tested the ladder for loose or tricky mechanisms which might lead to a
nasty fall, we'll simply retun to the quite-spacious vehicle and, your
choice, either remove everything but undergarments, bra excluded of
course because I don't consider that as something of enough value to
anyone to deliberately cover, no personal offense intended, but you
KNOW my stand on tits, OR just go ahead and remove everything in the
car and leave it in the car all laid out so it can be jumped quickly
back into in an orderly fashion except, as you well know, I really
MUST play my little games, and it's not too harsh in this one, but no
matter which way you decide to do it, after the fact all undergarments
go in the trunk for the rest of the duration of today's activities.
Any objections that I can't shout down to that rule I slipped in? Ah,
good. So, which way do you want to do it?" She smiled quirkily but
still awful damned warmly at me and poked me in the chest rockingly.
"I have my own games. Guess what my answer's going to be, and if
you're wrong, you only will have to wear undergarments for the rest of
the activity, but you'll have to wear mine." I knew her approximate
waist size, and it was tiny compared to mine, what with my mesomorph
bone structure and the hips and diameter of the pelvis, well, if I
guessed wrong my genitals would be utterly mangled after we got done
with the day, shit, that stretchy but unforgiving thin fabric would
push my cast-iron balls back up where they came from, and fold my
pecker accordion-style, neither of which even slightly appealed to me,
though I do have some amusing tales to tell about the man with the
musical member, I'll put those aside. I thought hard. I was lucky I
knew how to think in situations like this. I skimmed through
everything I had learned about her these few long weeks at lightning
speed, picking out anything that would strongly factor into what her
gut reaction to the situation would be. I then had a revealing thought
about her saintly complete lack of modesty as demonstrated during the
final days of SNAFU '99, wherein she had walked around my house for
better then six hours completely in the buff never thinking a thing
about it, and having questioned me, I remember it vividly, "Why don’t
you want me naked in your kitchen?" after I had tried to devise a way
for her to wash that difficult spot on her back where the tattoo was
without getting her trousers wet, only briefly having thought of her
just removing them and having dismissed the idea as something
impractical but nice, and we traded blows on that subject jokingly for
quite a while, and then, yes, I still had it, it doesn't just go away
because you retire from doing it as a career, I had the frozen moment
of a prior conversation that I'd had with her the day we took that
kickass Hayabusa out, which I had later researched and learned that
stock, right off the lot, the top speed on that was 207 and
decimal-point change, and I had guessed we were at 198, but the 207
number came from a flat surface, and when I announced our top speed we
were going down a fairly-steep-for-a-tollway decline, and so I
surmised that we were probably up around 213 after battling with
physics I'd long since decided never to use again. Anyway, aaround the
end of that night, at the house, I remember defending myself in a
slight argument again concerning modesty in which I had said, "...I'm
quite used to seeing you around here in a state of undress, in fact I
can count off three different map points where the same rings true,"
and, thinking back, after tonight, that number would grow to six total
seperate locations in which I am accustomed to seeing her in a state
of undress in. I immediately knew the correct answer to the question.
Now a few you are out there thinking, "Wait, a few pages back didn't
you say and doesn't this as well as all the other posts indicate
strongly that she is also powerfully unpredictable, meaning that the
sensible choice you ferreted out, or any of the two answers, would
only have a fifty percent chance of being correct, due to her
unpredictability?" To which I'll simply say no, because it is her
actions that are spontaneous, not unpredictable. Amateurs are
unpredictable and that's a bad thing. Professionals, you NEVER know
what they're going to do to get the job done but you DO know that
whatever it is, it's going to be the most efficient and definitive
victory you've ever seen. So you're full of shit if that's what you're
thinking. ANYWAY, I went ahead and placed my bet. "I'll go for your
little game, and I'll win. Because I'm going to guess randomly and I
know that I have luck on my side, otherwise I wouldn't be standing
here staring into your beautiful face if I didn't have tremendous luck
on my side," I inferred extremely sincerely but just coyly enough to
give it that scent of absolute reality, enough to negate that part of
her (and everyone) that would meet such a challenge as "I know I'm
going to win" by telling them that any answer they give is wrong just
to put the smug little bastard in his or her place. I know how to
disarm people. "I'm going to say that, the hell with it, if you're
going to take off the majority of your clothing anyway, why not make
more space and give less of a chance to forget or kick to the ground
unknowingly said undergarments, I say that's how you feel about it." I
smiled dumbly, still having to fend off that edge that could allow her
to feel strongly enough abou tmy attitude to cheat in her own game,
something that is very easy to do, but not when you had a heart like
that girl did and a matching mind. There was silence as she picked up
the tension on me, and duly, I pretended to get nervous and slightly
but noncomittally doubtful about my answer and talked to myself, going
completely out of character but I had to, I was playing a role and I
couldn't let her know that I was. Finally she wordlessly started
walking to the car, at the halfway point unzipping and snapping away
her soft miniskirt which looked no larger than a dishtowel as she
carried it in one hand. I didn't react, playing out the last scene of
my role. She stopped when she got to the car, already having shed her
T-shirt and brassiere, and turned around and said softly, but not
deseatedly, that's what I was hoping to avoid, "Well, come on, let's
get moving. Why not check out the house in the nude as well, it'll
save us a trip. I grinned finally and jogged over to the car, pulling
off my shirt before I unlocked her door and proceeded around to mine.
I didn't activate the alarm this time because I was in a
more-than-secure part of town where I doubt any car has ever been
stolen, even if it had the keys in the ignition and the doors
unlocked, and also because of that, I didn't even need to trade a bit
of security for a few precious seconds in making a getaway, I further
left the doors unlocked. The car was within sight of the treehouse,
and I have great hearing, if anyone opened a car door I'd make time to
check to see that I didn't have to waste a few good rounds of
ammunition to clear someone's head of their cancer of defunct brain
tissue. Inside the car, I quickly worked my boots off and set them on
the passenger side just in case I needed to motor fast and they'd have
gotten in the way of my fast feet over on this side. I slid off the
Glitterati super-multicolour ever-changing trousers and stood
awkwardly up to lay them on the seat draped over the edge for easy
access but no encumberance in getting away fast, either. I slid my
boxers off, placed them as well on the edge of my seat, and looked
briefly over to discover that we had somehow kept the same pace as we
worked on pulling off socks and figuring out where to put them. "You
know, it might get painful walking all over hell trying to hear
through the windows and all of that other Ninja shit, you'll notice
that our bare feet will be in direct contact with semi-rocky,
stiff-weedy (I just love that hyphenated word to death), perhaps
cactus-hiding hard dirt harbouring all kinds of shit that's painful to
step on if not somewhat severely disabling, like those little tiny
cactuses that grow around here. You want to skip it?" I knew what she
was getting at. There's a certain rush and feeling that accompanies
sex in a public place, and there is a similar but much stronger
perverse sort of semi-frightened but the thought of the danger makes
it all the more fun and intense because it's supposedly taboo type of
feeling that comes when engaging in any kind of sexual activity
knowing that there is a danger that other people might discover you
doing what you shouldn't be doing, and she simply didn't want to take
that combined rush and exhiliration away from this event by even
giving a flying fuck if anyone was home, was going to come home, had a
dog that would alert the neighbours or anything of the type. In fact,
I already knew that we were not, going to, she especially, even make
an attempt at keeping down the noise and more likely than not would
have secretive and juvenile 'games' of trying to make just enough
noise to get someone to turn on a porch light briefly, mutter, "Damn
mating dogs," and go back in the house, only to come out again
wondering just what the hell was indeed going on, perhaps taking a
look around with his National Audobon Prude Edition Issue
birdwatching-only high-powered binoculars and strange shit like that,
no one reading this who has never been fucked in a public place or a
place where they were in danger of being discovered (unless they have
some bizarre reverse-voyeuristic fetish) is going to understand this
bit and I've been in many such a situation before and know how others
and to an extent myself react to these special sets of circumstances,
I mean, you should understnad but you're just not the type of people
to seek out the ultimately-risqué, but I'm sure at least one of you
guys has had one of those
I-hope-I-get-caught-jacking-off-by-that-thirteen-year-old-girl-I'm-babysitting
types of experiences, or maybe not, but anyway back to the fucking
story. I tried as best I could to let her know that I knew exactly why
she wanted to go for this minimal-security thing and assure her that
I'd probably get the same kick off of it that she did and that there
was absolutely nothing abnormal about it and that I wasn't going to
tell her this but I picked this paricular spot not because it was the
only treehouse in the Metro area, but it was the one with the best
atmosphere for being conspicuous without being blatantly obvious and
the best place to be semi-exhibitionistic about it because you get
sick of being safely locked away from prying eyes every time you
screw, and I added that I sincerely doubt, in fact I'd bet good money
against, the fact that there could be any cactuses or inherently
large-sharp stones becuase the people who had this built have young
children and they probably routinely inspect the surrounding area for
anything their precious little whelps could in any way damage
themselves with in any way, and parents are so overbearingly
overprotective that any cactuses that were around here were probably
destroyed completely through the most thorough means of overkill and
prevention of further growth humanly possible, and the entire area
around the tree house and probably all the way around the house had
been made safe for people to walk barefooted in the dark on, because
that almost perfectly describes how careful and cognizant of their
surrounding small children are, blind to the world and not giving a
damn about having anything cover their feet. Finally, I asked her if
she was ready to do this after getting genuine and hearty agreements
on my statements about the zero cactus or sharp jutting stone danger
in getting there and some laughs about the description of the
children. She opened the car door, I told her not to lock it this time
in the rare case that we had to evacuate the area suddenly, as it
would save precious time, and she agreed and popped the lock back up.
I got out of the car carrying the only two items we brought with us,
the TNVGs for watching our backs better than anyone looking straight
at us could discern unaided in case there was thrashing around in
nearby brush or something else that needed investigation, and my Glock
20, in the extremely unlikely event that we'd be faced with armed
psychopathic resistance from nutty homeowners, which I knew from
rather odd and somewhat disturbing real life experience to be a very
valid threat to people who weren't supposed to be somewhere. I have
been in situations where members of my team, who were no more than
traces of memories of ghosts in their movement from place to place
through places such as apartment buildings, around remote and
not-so-remote dwellings, and even in abandoned or ruined parts of
cities, come under deliberate fire from people they didn't even have
it in their minds to kill or even bother, that is, until some crackpot
with a shotgun and a rottweiler starts taking deliberate aim at him
screaming his lungs out and, though never actually hitting anyone in
their mad rampages that I know of, were duly silenced by returned fire
which always hit exactly on target. There are nutcases everywhere, and
nutcases tend for some reason to have easy access to firepower, ghod,
I wish I could tell you about a couple of those gigs that went down in
the South where crackers popped up like fucking Indians every five
minutes to guard their still from a hunting blind or some shit, we
took out more people that we weren't authorized to kill until they
tried to do the same to us than all the specific targets we had in a
compound all holed up with machine guns, and we were fucking ambushed
by people who had no fucking clue who we were but would have started
shooting at a tank if it was going to come anywhere near their family
still. Crazy bunch of motherfuckers down South. Like fucking Cambodia,
parts of it. ANYWAY END OF ASIDE STROKE JUSTIFICATION FOR CARRYING
WEAPON, ON WITH STORY:

We ambled in the buff through the tough but mostly dirt terrain for
about forty of the sixty yards from tree to street and parked car, and
as I had predicted it had all been relandscaped with really soft peat
moss or something similar, cushioning the feet as one walked. No
stones, cactus, land mines, tacks, nails, railroad ties, spiked pits,
or human activity hindered us. Just when I reached the base of the
tree and carefully moved over to where the actually cumbersome
platform-ladder came from a spot buried into the ground fairly deep
and of course secure (not to mention a steel braces with what looked
like ten-inch-long, inch-diameter wood screws drilled into the tree
trunk to secure the brace which gripped the ladder, on both sides,
between every single step including four in a row at the bottom and
top, this thing would easily hold a thousand pounds steady in a
hurricane, and it irked me that people can care so overly fucking much
about their children who will do nothing but shit on them and take
every last dime they earn one way or another for the next twenty years
of their lives and who haven't learned or known enough about the world
yet so that it really makes a fucking whit of difference if they live
or die, in fact the latter would be preferable what with the obsession
for making billions of useless children to soak up money and resources
and everything else, causing a grim overpopulation that is certainly
no joke, and on the other hand spit full in the faces of their fellow
man who, unlike those fucking brats, knows a great deal about how the
world works, just might be making a difference or rather at least a
contribution to some facet of society, who is responsible, has a job,
is entirely self-sufficient, and has actually earned the right to life
by proving that he has some form of worth that the public can benefit
from. the whole idea of extending a proud father's family legacy is
long dead, you should be _ashamed_ to bring yet another open
noisemaking needy mouth, forever a blister on the ass of the world
into existence. I shook my head. I always knew that collectively
society was mentally handicapped, but every now and then like this you
get reminders of just why you HATE society and would if you could get
away with it pour a few billion gallons of chlorine into the gene pool
and just be able to kill off any stupid motherfucker that you come
across and give away everything he owned. Genocide or ethnocide is too
good for these raving morons, there should be an automatic kill gene
somewhere that simply ends your life if you can't prove yourself to be
an intelligent, functioning, worthwhile being by a certain number of
years. Ahem. Anyway, just as I rounded the side of the tree with the
ladder, which pointed at a steep angle towards one of the walls of the
house which suddenly looked a whole lot closer than my estimate of
sixty feet between the two, more like just barely thirty feet, just as
that realization passed through my head I caught a flash out of my
peripheral vision and immediately hissed softly, "_GET DOWN!_" and
fall against the side of the tree leaning against the ladder, my head
still in the process of turning to see what it was that had flashed
and was now glowing. It was a weird reflection from one of the windows
on the first floor approximately in the middle of that wall of the
house. The curtains were drawn and the window was definitely shut, in
fact, it didn't even open, and I noticed it was constructed of some
thick-ass plate glass, very unusual for a window, and _tinted_ at
that, tinted a medium-dark shade of an equally medium-dark blue. I had
to make a couple of assurances, and quickly donned and adjusted the
NVGs to fit me, flipped them on, first got a readout on the distance
from the tree I was up against to that window, which was 48.631 feet,
and then I curiously clicked the map on and found out that the wall
with the tinted windows on the first floor only faced due east, and
the rising sun would be a bitch, so the tinted windows made sense. Why
they were so thick I just chalked up to luck, as the thicker they
were, the less sound would reverberate them, they were thicker than
two inches which is sufficient to negate hearing sounds ambiently
through the glass itself, and unless the window had bad seals even
quite loud noises would just bounce off the incredibly thick plate
glass, not even rattling it it was so dense. I figured that not all of
the windows we'd be as lucky with, as some of them HAD to open for
cleaning and ventilation, in fact most of them, and windows that
opened were usually made of a medium-thick glass with absolutely
crappy sound insulation. But they'd have a television blaring like any
american family at 1930 hours on a Sunday night, and I felt quite safe
to my initial surprise. I told Krista in a normal speaking voice that
it was all okay, I had just scoped out the windows and they were
perfect, almost four fucking inches of solid plate glass, and even
better, darkly tinted because they faced east and the sun would always
come in so they got them tinted, but at night have you ever tried to
look outside of a limousine window or even the side windows on my
Charger? You can't see shit, it's like wearing really black sunglasses
in the darkest of night without any natural night vision because you
have a light on in the room, everything was cool and I was going to
proceed up the ladder, already having checked it for faults and
finding it much more stout than it ever could have possibly needed to
be, and she should follow right on my ass because we needed a little
while to relax up there before any of this would work, we'd have to be
calm and cool with everything and isolate ourselves mentally from our
surroundings to achieve the best effects. She nodded and followed my
ginger steps up the ladder, the metal of which was slightly cool on my
feet. As I reached the top I noticed that no expense had been spared
building this fucking treehouse. The handrails of the ladder continued
up and had somehow been driven completely through a thick branch which
hung in the perfect spot to anchor it just above the gazebo roof, but
the steps ended exactly at the level of the heavily-reinforced floor
which could have possibly been strong enough to hold the weight of a
car without coming apart. The floor of the place, I noticed, as I
climbed into the very spacious (a little larger even than one of those
tiny gazebo-looking outdoor spa enclosures, but not near as high,
though I could stand up inside it and extend my arms above my head to
the bend of my elbow, meaning it was almost exactly seven feet from
floor to ceiling, Krista had made a nice assumption) and fairly warm
structure, was not plywood or decking material or anything cheap. It
was a hunk of real, finished, housing-grade pine flooring material
with extra coats of a special non-slip slightly textured but not
abrasive clear resin. It may have easily cost five hundred bucks for
the floor alone. Krista made it up after me and remarked about how
nice and warm it was in here. "We're dealing with some kind of rich
master carpenter here," I noted, "Look at this floor. It's
housing-grade, probably cost five hundred bucks plus ninety or so for
this... You seen this yet? Look closely, there's an application of
really thick multiple coats of a non-slip resin which also serves to
protect the floor from spills and rain. The construction of this place
is ... well, _fanatic_. Everything's overly done. Screws instead of
nails in the walls. All of that crap securing this place to the tree
in every last available exposed inch they could, and they got real
creative making it a hell of a lot more secure than it'll ever come
close to needing to be. Plate-glass windows with silicone caulk all
around them. Custom-made, internally-reinforced gazebo-style roof to
allow equal headroom all around the structure, and enough headroom for
fucking Manute Bol to relax in high heels inside of. The walls, the
fucking walls, THAT'S why they're so thick, they are not solid wood!
Here, look at the edge of the wall. See that? That's a long strip of
wood between two regular-sized boards, and in the middle I'll bet you
anything there is some really good insulation material, and that's why
it's warmer in here than it is outside. Close those curtains, what are
they made of? Aha, stage curtain material, extremely thick, probably
with some sort of leather or stiff, non-cloth material sewn in the
middle to prevent rain and winds from blowing through. This is fucking
insanity! Close all the curtains and see how warm our body heat alone
makes this place, I'll bet it gets like a sauna in here, ghod, it's
gonna be _PERFECT_ for our purposes, and the kicker is that the insane
schmo who spent a couple thousand dollars building this place for his
fucking kids has no idea that he's created a little
copulation-cottage, a sex-shed, a perfect carnal kennel for people
he's never going to know were even here to enjoy it in ways those kids
never will approach!" Krista sprawled out comfortably on the smooth
but slip-free floor, stretched, and sussurated warmly, "Come over
here, I want to discuss an idea..." I took up a position at her side
and was still amused more than amazed to find that no matter in which
way or how far I stretched, I couldn't even get close to the other
wall. It was getting warmer in there. Soon the windows would fog over
from the inside. "You know, if all goes well, more than twice we're
going to have to come back here, I hope you know the way. This is
going to be an absolutely surreal experience and memory. How many
people do you think there are in the world that can claim truthfully,
"Yeah, I've had sex as an adult in some kid's treehouse thirty feet
off the ground in the middle of a populated neighbourhood and it was
the best damn time I've ever had..."? This is, if you'll pardon the
unintentional pun, really going out on a limb sexually, stretching
things far beyond the limits that most people impose on their dreary
sexual lives. That added excitement and heightened intensity that come
along with the lingering chance of being discovered as well as the
perverse rush that accompanies screwing in a strange or public place I
feel is really going to make a hell of a difference this time around.
Those are things that you can't just add to your everyday sexual
experiences, those have limitations, this will be pleasantly
surprisingly different than anything else. The close quarters make for
a highly intimate setting, though I wish they had a light, but that
would kind of give us away, I guess, but it would still be nice..." I
had an idea. It was damn near a full moon tonight with hardly any
cloud cover. Moon- and star-light could filter into the place from the
two large windows. I opened the strange shade on the window most
facing the house, which we were above the roof of, and I took the
empty can of Slice and slid back the soft door-curtain on one side and
tossed it to the soft dirt below. I returned to her side and she laid
an arm around my shoulder girdle. "You've got to promise me
something." "What's that?" "That you won't go to sleep no matter how
exhausted you are after this is through, becuase I'm pretty sure I
will, and we'd be completely fucked if we both nodded off, you can
imagine the consequences." This was a serious concern. I'd have to
devote a lot of energy to getting her up and getting us gone without
chancing being noticed. I knew that if I recognized the fact that we
were in jeopardy if we allowed that to happen I could certainly pull
through and get moving again. "Yeah, I can do that. You can count on
me not to get caught. As always." I grinned, which is a strange thing
to do when you're naked, but nonetheless so was this whole scene...

And we made the most of it. At one point I thanked the architect as
loudly as I could think for putting plate-glass windows in the
treehouse because Krista would otherwise have put her foot through
one. The treehouse was so well-secured that it didn't so much as creak
from the wild movement being unleashed within it. I also had to make
an appeal to the gods that the neighbors didn't have their windows
open and had air conditioning instead as the action grew to
overly-loud, even for a fully-well insulated place with plate glass
windows and soundproofing curtains thirty foot up in a tree. At one
point I figured that she wouldn't even be that loud if she slipped and
fell OUT of the place and KNEW it. Audio feedback, especially
amplified as it was, is always extremely gratifying, though, so I
can't complain. I had been right about the place being so
well-insulated. It WAS like a sauna in there, to the point where I was
thankful that it was a Glock I had in there instead of a conventional
all-steel pistol, which was good for a laugh. We had been at it like
coked-to-the-gills minks for well over an hour when I sustained an
injury, a rather stupid one, but not really my fault. What had
happened was that I was fully exercising my cunnilinguistic
superpowers when the sensation must have overcome her rather like
direct contact with an electric chair's terminals while soaking in
saltwater and went up and back, propelled by her own powerful thighs,
about an arc of two and a half feet, landing on my abdomen and
knocking the wind out of me with her ass. It would have greatly amused
anyone watching, I came jerking up like the Living Dead from a morgue
slab, no hands or anything, probably an absolutely gruesome expression
on my face, and she fell backwards after landing, clawing hold
frantically of the curtain at one end and kind of hanging there like a
cat in a cartoon until it went through her mind that she was not in
danger of falling out of the place, and gradually resumed activities.
She was right about it being a different experience- no distractions,
nothing to come between the cosmic fucking and the two of us, no space
for the eyes to wander, nothing for them to wander to, complete
undivided attention on the other, the heat, it made for some REAL
tightrope intensity and a remarkably personal experience, almost
nothing like Naziism. Walls were being bashed against, several large
puddles were appearing on the well-sealed floor which were large
enough not to evaporate by the next time the fucking kids came up
here, which I really thought about and decided was punk as fuck, to
have little kids wandering around soaking it up, oblivious to what it
is or what made it, the floor was getting knocked around, windows
deeply fogged over, the lot. When everything was finally conceded to
be completely over, of course there was an exhaustion-desperation
death match round, and then there were two people collapsing almost
lifeless to the floor, splashing puddles around as they fell. I
succeeded in staying fully awake and aware, and crawled over and
yanked both of the curtains open to get the stale and well-used air
out and some fresh oxygen in as well as a pleasantly cooling breeze
for which we were both thankful. Some towels would have come in quite
handy, I noted, or a chamois cloth, maybe even a sponge to make it
more personal and infinitely time-consuming. Grabbing up the TNVGs to
keep myself occupied while the life drained back into Krista. All was
quiet on the southeastern front, in fact, there was little activity
anywhere. I was only slightly disappointed at learning this, since
tactically descending that ladder and crouch-running to a defensive
position would have been almost impossible at that point, it certainly
couldn't have been pulled off with any grace or good fortune. But on
another line of thought, the one you're most familiar with, the idea
of jumping out of some bushes naked with a colossal hard-on and
training a loaded weapon, smaller than the aforementioned erection, on
some victim of the suburban sprawl is at the very least an amusing
thought. I scanned the trees and flipped on the IR spotlight to see if
I could find any sleeping wildlife to no avail. My mind idle, I
imagined some 16-18 year old girl having watched jealously from a
darkened room on the side of the house with binoculars now retreating
to lock her door, not quite ready for sleep... I smiled and coughed a
laugh. I estimated it was now around 2140 hours and flipped off the
TNVGs, removing them and crawling over to check on Krista's condition.
She was flat on her back, one leg kinked up off quite a ways to the
side, her eyes closed, busily wiping the thick layer of sweet
perspiration from her neck, wiping around an area and then wiping her
hand off on the wall. It made dark streaks on the untreated stout
burnt sienna wood, each plank elaborately sealed with a matching
colour of caulk. Her hair was more than just damp, parts of her bangs
were dripping. The medium amount of moon- and star-light which
filtered in from the windows and open sides of the place made me wish
I had a sophisticated camera with me, because these would be beautiful
pictures indeed. The soft, "natural light" (the worst beer on the
planet, believe me) cast a warm glow over most of her body, less light
coming in from the open curtains, just very softly illuminating her
head and hair, which looked like it had strands of GITD (Glow In The
Dark) in it, and less light filtering in on the opposite side barely
catching the glistening coat of nectar over her skin and palely
illuminating drom the knees down. From there up to a little below her
collarbone, the side windows cast a significantly more powerful glow
on her saturated skin, causing large elliptical shadows beneath her
breasts and highlighting her powerful abdominal nomenclature. It was
truly a sight to behold, as the floor, even with its coating, was
still quite dark and the only reason she glowed was because of the
moisture reflecting and catching the light filtering in. I spoke
softly to get her attention and she warily responded, on the edge of
slumber, completely unaware of her surroundings, what time it might
be, where she was, only vaguely who I was, enough to recognize my
voice as something that required a response, I wondered what thoughts,
if any, were going through her head. "Are you about ready to go?"
"Why, what's the problem? Sun ain't out yet, we're safe." "Afraid it's
not that simple. You told me before we started that we still needed to
get moving when we were done, and you were very insistent upon it. I
take orders seriously. How much time do you need?" "Give me another
fifteen minutes, then I'll go. Relax, take it easy for a while." What
the hell? I slowly wormed my way to the
now-seemingly-unforgivingly-hard floor and crawled, asshole and
elbows, over up close enough to her, and laid my head above her pelvis
on soft, damp, smooth flesh, laying my arms out in front of me and to
the side, my wrist falling thankfully for both of us right between her
cleavage, though I had to turn it sideways to fit, and even then it
was a tight fit, but I really didn't care and neither, apparently, did
she. Somewhere in the distance a dismal man choked three-quarters to
death on a piece of chicken from Wendy's.

More like twenty minutes later, I found, without needing to put much
thought into it, a vulgar way (to some) to rouse the barely-conscious
Krista while also overindulging myself, no, wait, that's just not
true, you CAN'T overindulge in that area. Slowly, she began to feel
once again blood rushing on a false alarm to her crotch, and
semi-rapidly gained awareness of the situation and got halfway up,
leaning back on one hand, the other going to the back of my head with
some pressure exerted for about a minute and then released, lightly
grasping under my chin and pulling my head up. She had a wicked smile
on her face. "Best wake-up call I've ever gotten. You ready to go?"
"Sure." I got to my feet and pulled her up as coordination came back
to her. "There's no one out there, right?" "Not a soul that I could
see." "Well, then, we'd better go. Here." She handed me my pistol in
the correct manner, grip-first, and I took it and the NVGs and went
over to the open access bay, where I started down the ladder facing
forward so as not to knock my cock on every step. Halfway down, I got
a most pleasant view in checking to see if she was following me. I got
to the ground and thought again about bringing a couple of towels. The
moisture covering my skin got cool a lot quicker than my skin itself,
bringing a body chill to me out in the open. Soon after, Krista
followed and we slowly made our way back to the car and got in and
started dressing, undergarments safely in the trunk. This took a
while, but we sluggishly got it done, and I turned to my third-empty
liter bottle of carbonated drink and took some meth. "Give me some of
that, I need it more than you." I handed her a few tablets and the
bottle, which she finished off. I thought about what it was that was
making me so sluggish and slightly cottonmouthed. The answer came
naturally during the asking of the question. At least I hadn't killed
any important brain cells up there. "We need to hydrate ourselves, all
of that immense fucking sweating, and I suppose fuck-sweating, and
extended activity took a lot of fluids out of us. I'll stop by an
all-night gas station and we can pick something up. Wouldn't be a bad
idea to have a medium-sized snack, either." "You're right, we should
do that. I don't know, but I'm getting some really fucking crazy ideas
in my head." "Such as?" She smiled slyly. "I'll show you when we go to
pay at the gas station." "Okay, as long as it doesn't involve sticking
the place up, I'm not going to do that, I have more money in my wallet
than they have in the fucking safe." "No, nothing like that, but I
assure you we'll be getting everything for free," she added with a
sweet but dangerous chuckle. "How are we doing on gas, anyway?" I
checked. "About a half a tank, maybe a little less, why?" "Don't pay
at the pump, pay inside, the gas will be free too. And just so you
don't get the wrong idea, you won't even have to bring your sidearm
in, I'll make it happen, nobody gets hurt, no crimes committed." I
started to really wonder if SHE had killed vital brain cells, amidst
all the impossible suggestions and partially maniacal laughter.
Perhaps she DID have a valid plan, and if it worked, hey, getting shit
for free is one of the essential rules of acquiring massive wealth,
believe it or not, and if she wasn't going to commit any crimes, even
if it failed no one would complain and I'd just shell out fifteen
bucks or so and we'd be on our way. I started out, flicked my lights
on once I turned off of the road from which we came, and then drove a
bit more aggressively, because then I didn't care if anyone heard (and
how could they NOT?) the loud, aggressive powerful rumbling coming
from my big custom exhaust system. After a while down the right (read:
dangerously mismanaged and idiotically constructed) roads, I got into
the outskirts (which are practically a city of their own, about
fifteen miles of it all around, like a fucking moat) of Greenwood
Village and slowed to five over the speed limit, turning Crass down
quite a few notches and wondering why I even HAD that CD among my
thirty-three selections of compact discs in the changer cartridges.
The entire sound system in this car had cost more than the engine,
that is, before I hopped the engine up tremendously. I had a huge deck
that cost well over a thousand bucks custom-ordered so it had a tape
deck, truly digital am/fm radio, full-featured CD changer controller,
and the wildest-looking gigantic active fluid display with a bunch of
modes and full options, a top-of-the-line 33-CD changer in the trunk,
the absolute best of every last part right down to the battery
terminal clamp, solid fuckin' gold, two five-and-a-half-inch speakers
mounted flush in the dash in the places where they'd produce the best
sound, some engineer figured that out, two six-inch speakers again
strategically-placed, two on each door, and the two twelve-inch
enclosures in the back, an incredibly high-powered amp, wiring
harnesses, professional installation, rattle-eliminating clever
sound-deadening substance put everywhere where things would rattle,
but not doing any kind of job of making it so that the bass and even
midrange weren't as easily-heard outside the car as inside, and a full
digital graphics equalizer and the most useless fucking things in the
world for a CAR audio system: two matching REMOTE CONTROLS. WTF?? I
left them at home, I could not persuade them, even after all the
fucking money I put in, to demand that the people at the factory put a
delete option on the order, taking out anything infrared and charging
me that much less for it. Even the salesmen couldn't justify the need
for a remote control for a car audio system. Ricockulous. Anyway, I
hoped this would strike up a conversation, and it did. Right after I
turned it down quite low, there was a short pause and we both spoke at
once, halted, then tried the same thing again, and I shut up for the
third attempt so the conversation could get nice and out of hand
without interruptions. "Back there, that was, shit, I don't know how
to classify it, let alone describe it. Crazy shit, man. Insane. As I
said, we're going back there again, at least twice more. I know you
enjoyed it enough to continue it, I fuckin' KNOW. And it goes doubly
for me. But next time we need to bring like a pillow or a towel or
something for the floor. Did you notice the puddles?" "Oh hell yeah.
In fact..." I explained to her my previous thought about them not
having time to fully evaporate and such, and she laughed heartily.
"There's still a burning question... What would you have done if we
were caught? Like right in the middle of the fun." "Well, I'd be
pissed, and if it was just one guy, I'd make it down that ladder
faster than you can believe, make sure he knows I have a loaded weapon
locked right between his eyes, tell him that if he makes any kind of
sound that I won't hesitate to shoot his ass, then lead him from
behind in an armlock to the car, open the trunk, keeping the weapon on
him at all times, put several layers of duct tape around his mouth and
head, over the eyes, handcuff him, legcuff him with his feet crossed,
and throw his ass into the bushes somewhere, go back up the ladder,
and resume. If it was more than one person, I'd get them all on the
ground shut up and we'd jet. If any of them were armed with any kind
of firearm, I'd shoot the sons of bitches and we'd REALLY move. But
the likelihood of anyone catching us is slim to none in that
neighbourhood. We're safe." "Yeah, I know, I just wondered,,," she
added with a strange laugh, "so I take it that was as good for you as
it was for me?" I laughed at the supremely corny line. "Well, that
depends upon how good something can BE to you..." She laughed, then I
joined in, at the sheer amount of corn that was issuing forth from our
mouths, saying "Hee hee hee" into the black void of the night.

We were almost to the heart of Greenwood Village and I spied a gas
station and pulled in, up to a pump, got out and started pumping gas,
choosing, as I had been told, to pay inside. Krista stayed in the car,
I could hear her gears turning quietly. I finished pumping the petrol
and signalled for her to come along inside. The place was deserted
save a lonely-looking attendee of about nineteen callow years. Perhaps
she would scam him. But for now she was ultimately cool, gathering up
a huge sixty-four-ounce soda in a plastic cup and I did the same.
Discreetly I noticed that the attendee was staring at her. I didn't do
anything, and I really couldn't have through the BR glass that all
all-night gas stations now have. I went over and picked up a few
Little Debbie Star Crunch cakes, the ultimate in snack/junk food, and
she picked up some food as well, and glanced at me with a look
indicating, "I'LL handle it, back off." I shrugged internally (it's a
trick I learned) and we went up and laid the items on the small space
of counter allotted to us on our side. The cashier started punching
things into his terminal and told us to hold the UPCs up to the window
so he could scan them, tiredly. Krista started placing everything off
to the side, then vaulted up onto the counter, her knees against the
plexiglas. I had a good idea of what she was trying to pull off and
smiled, hoping this would work. "No, you're not going to need to scan
them, scan _THIS_," she rumbled, yanking back her miniskirt. Shit. She
was really stoned. I suppressed laughter quite well and the poor kid
nearly falls off his barstool, eyes like saucers going over her
anatomy. "We don't have enough money," she whined, "could you maybe
cancel the sale, the gas and all? I'm sorry to have to do this to you,
but, well, it's all I could think of. Please?" She stretched, almost
losing her balance on the counter. I got her back and supported her,
and she went into even more exotic posing, pressing herself up against
the glass. The kid simply smiled and nodded and hit a few keys on his
terminal accompanied by "Are you SURE?" beeps, never really looking at
the screen. Knew what he was doing, I'll give him that. Krista,
however, was going way too far. Because he hadn't said anything yet,
she spoke through the hole in the glass at him, and, long story short,
I had to watch as this ugly kid dropped his trousers to show off what
little he had and, worse, listen to Krista's feigned admiration. I
could hardly contain my laughter. "Can we go now, or did you want me
to stay?" "Oh, yeah, you can go, you can stay, whatever you want to
do, you want some cash from the register, I can do that..." She
laughed coquettishly. "No, that won't be necessary. Just come close
and get a good look," she said loudly, and then quietly, low enough
that he couldn't hear, "because someone the likes of YOU won't get
another glimpse for ten years if that." At hearing that I laughed out
loud. The kid did as he was told and didn't even hear me or pay
attention if he did. She gave him a hell of a nice view, then backed
off the counter. I caught her and lowered her gently to the ground.
She gathered up items of food and drink and, as a final request,
added, "Be sure to tell all the others about me, I might just drop in
again. Thanks a lot, have a real nice night." She waved and walked
straight out the door. Sure, it had been a cheap trick, but we had the
right audience, and if she was willing to do it I surmised that she
probably got more of a kick out of doing it than getting the free gas
and supplies, and more out of it than the kid got on the receiving end
of it all. I got into the car and there was a pause before we started
laughing. It was a hell of a trick, and it worked. I congratulated her
on her sluttish ways and she poked me in the ribs, remarking, "Hey, it
worked, didn't it?" I had to cede her that. "Yeah, it did. Thanks for
the free shit." "You're quite welcome." And with that I cranked up a
Hopeless comp and took off, wondering what to do next.

"We should find a place to sit and eat in peace," she suggested
finally. Thinking about that, I headed off for a park I knew of
somewhat close to where I used to work. Took about ten minutes.
Unfenced, it was easy to gain access to and we lugged a bunch of food
over to a park bench, sat, conversed, and ate. The gist of the
conversation filtered our experiences like so many pine needles
through a thick tree. "So what's the most danger we've been in so
far?" I thought about that. "Probably The Perfect Crime. That was one
area in which response by authorities could not be completely
predicted. Add to that the fact that we were split up into little
teams miles away from one another with very little in the way of
contact between us. That was not the kind of danger you get a rush out
of. It was the kind you were extremely relieved to see everyone alive
afterwards. Took balls to pull off, you would have expected the
untrained to fold under pressure, but, as I said, "those bastards were
as steady as fucking bronze statues." Remarkable by anyone's measure.
Would you agree with that choice?" She nodded, eating some flavoured
corn chips. "However, when we took that bike out to ungodly speeds, we
were risking life and limb every second of the way. That's a
consideration, isn't it?" "Not really, because I knew exactly what I
was doing. Granted, everyone makes mistakes, but as a professional,
very _fucking_ few if any, especially when doing something as
dangerous as that. I wasn't completely in control of the circumstances
during The Perfect Crime. That's because we were broken up." "Yeah, I
see what you mean. Okay, so at what point in time did we accomplish
the most?" "Well, that's hard to say, because SNAFU '99 went on for
days, and was broken into a bunch of separate events, but during it,
we most certainly accomplished the most." "Yeah, bad question. Um, so,
ehh, when were we..." I cut her off. "Listen, I know you have good
intentions for going over our experiences with a lice comb here with
the questions, but objective evaluation of sets of events can only be
accomplished by processing hard data and statistics. It's the sad
truth of how things like this work. I had to make that transition from
field evaluation, which admittedly was slightly subjective, to
post-process evaluation around 1986, when we all had to switch the way
we did things around in the Agency. Even though only a select few
people ever GOT those reports, they too had been trained to evaluate
them according to statistics and standards instead of the word of the
person who had written them up. But that's beside the point, what
we're doing right now is trying to tow a locomotive going east using
another identical engine that's going west. Eventually we'll break
something and all hell will break loose." "What the hell are you on
about? Sorry, I just don't get the metaphor." "What I'm trying to say
is that we're picking apart our experiences and judging them and
classifying them according to our own personal memories of them, and
if we keep picking them apart, like disarming a bomb, we're going to
cut the wrong wire and it'll blow up in our faces. What did we do this
all for?" "We did it to show that we could do it? We did it for fun?"
"Precisely. And nothing is less fun than taking those fun experiences
and denigrating them by shoving them all into the right boxes. To make
a more blatant and easily-understood example of this phenomenon, I'll
ask you a question, and you tell me how it feels to try and answer it.
Okay?" She sipped on some soda. "Shoot." Ever-ready for interrogation,
she was, always ready to try and prove the impossible possible. A
little overeager. A natural field agent, but that was a lost cause.
"Okay, tonight up in the treehouse, rate each seperate act or instance
of sexual contact according to how good it was to you." She paused a
second. Shit, she was actually going to try this. "When I was braced
up against the wall for the... first time.... no, wait, shit, you're
right. But how in the hell does that relate to this?" "Well, as I
asked you, tell me how it feels to try and pick apart such a personal
experience, an experience that's so intermeshed with who you are,
where you were, and all kinds of other shit that it truly is an
EXPERIENCE, which begets a MEMORY, and while it is definitely
possible, categorizing memories is hard because it forces you to
classify and make stale something that's fond to you in your head.
Damn. I just answered the question for you. Oh, well. But you
understand what I'm getting at?" She consumed what was left of a
Ding-Dong. "Yeah. You're right. Bad topic for conversation. What,
then, would be a good way to go over the memories?" "I don't know."
"Yes you do!" "Well, you're right, I do, but I don't feel like doing
it so I won't tell you. Besides, making the memories is priority one.
And we haven't amassed a huge lot as of yet, so I'll think about it
when we really have a whole hell of a lot to go by." "Well, answer me
this: Have we had a BAD experience yet?" "Not from my standpoint,
let's keep it that way." "Damn straight." This ended that
conversation, which was awkward and unproductive. Sixty-four ounces is
a lot to drink, even when you're dehydrated. I remembered that you
weren't supposed to overindulge or you'd get stomach and muscle cramps
or similar problems, and I certainly didn't want that, so I drank
slowly and "nourished" myself on wonderful Star Crunch cakes. Finally
Krista asked a question, begetting another small conversation. "What
should we do next? I feel strangely energized, quite possibly because
I ingested methamphetamines." I thought. "Well, hardly anything's
open, and hardly anyone's out, so, I suppose, the best choice would be
to go back to the house and watch some videos, play some billiards, do
something of the sort." I smelled something burning. Krista popped her
head up and spoke anxiously. "I've got an idea. Let's do that, go back
to your place, and, well, I should ask first..." "What? Ask who? Me?
What are you planning?!?" "Nothing bad, I just wondered if you'd share
that 'collection' you spoke of with me, and possibly add me to it..."
"This is strange. Why on earth do you want to look at my collection of
pornography?" I asked the question pleadingly. She mistook it for
something else. "Oh, you don't WANT me to see it, that's the
ticket..." "No, it's not. It's just flat bizarre for you, as a
straight woman with absolutely _NO_ problems in the area of genitalia,
to ask to see a large collection of detailed photography of the same,
unless you had a vested hidden interest in the subject or a fetish or
fixation you never told ME about." "You got me into it with your
explanation of the wide, wide world of snatch studies in the Arby's
parking lot. And now, knowing that there are people who know THAT much
about it, I'd like to see how I measure up. How do you do that?"
"Well, I wouldn't need a picture, and it's a hell of a lot easier to
go off of a real subject than a photo anyway, since measurements
especially have to be judged by objects at certain distances or other
parts of the body such as the eye, or, given the opportunity,
something a little closer to home, if you get my drift, and it's
painstaking and time-consuming to get proper accurate scales for such
things, but do you WANT to go through having your genitalia measured
in every way imaginable, catalogued, and compared to people you'll
never meet or know, I just think the idea's fucked-up. Not that I
wouldn't do it, but it's fucked-up." She smiled. "I wouldn't mind. In
fact, there's something about me that I've never told you..." Cutting
her off, I interjected a sharp, "DON'T tell me, then. Keep your
secrets." "Okay, it's just that I might be able to make it possible
for you to do a side-by-side comparison with someone who I DO KNOW,
and that includes in the Biblical sense." My mind reeled. "You're bi?
What's the deal?" "Sort of. I know this girl named Leah who'd more
than likely volunteer to be so measured and catalogued, but now that I
think about it, I'd have to talk to her first to explain all about how
there IS someone like you in that way... Another time, perhaps." I
could read her like a book. She wanted the dominantly sex-oriented
male part of me to jump out and plead with her to go to any extent to
make this happen, but I wasn't going to do that. It would not be
professional. In fact, such a practise would be frowned upon by the
ACS and probably at the local level, and I had a stainless reputation
that I'd rather not tarnish in such a manner, even if I didn't tell
anyone about it. No, I wouldn't play along with this bizarre game. In
fact, I'd make sure that she was otherwise occupied so she couldn't
profane my delicate research with outsider comments and
misunderstanding. Some things happen to be sacred, and that's all
there is to it. I finished eating and had consumed most of the
beverage, as had she, and I suggested that we get a move on. Inbetween
now and when we arrived, I'd have to think, hard, about something else
with which to distract her. Needed to get her off of this path without
directly rebuking her. I knew how to do that professionally and thus
with a great deal of certainty, but I had come upon a thought block
for some reason. Think around the block. NO. Think THROUGH the block.

My eyes came to rest on the jagged, pale, barely-visible nighttime
horizon as I headed south on the practically unpopulated interstate.
Deliberately keeping my right foot off of the floor to give me time to
think, I quickly pondered the merits of slipping her a mickey after I
got home, carrying her into bed, and easily being able to forego the
problem entirely. No, that would leave her with a memory gap, and
she'd know I'd drugged her and would have all sorts of interesting
ideas as to why. As I had learned early on in the intelligence
business, objects are incredibly easy to hide, the truth is easily
masked, concepts can be obscured, but the motivations of other people
are harder to make unnoticeable than an elephant in the middle of a
schoolyard. I didn't have the tools or the training to brainwash the
idea out of her head, and besides, that's all 1940s science fiction
anyway, and I'd already ruled out drugging her. I never allow myself
at any point in time to be left with just one option open. I could
effectively distract her, which seemed like the most difficult thing
to pull off, but the most effective as she wouldn't even bring the
subject up and would be happy nonetheless; I could partially 'flake'
the event by generating some instant magic on the computer to make it
seem as though I'd lost a sector on the hard drive and all of those
thousands of photos I'd collected and painstakingly scanned in and
downloaded from bulletin boards and later the internet and had sent to
me from mail-order places and even scanned in right off of the genuine
article sitting on my scanner bed, and I could brilliantly feign
shock, horror, disbelief, recovery attempts, frustration, anger,
dangerous rage, and even control my emotional level to the point where
Krista's large, warm heart would come in and try for the longest time,
however long it took, to assuage my emotions over the loss and thus
wouldn't ever think about the fact that I had hard copies in printed
format, magazine pages, scrapbooks, hard data I'd duplicated, videos
of all makes, and backup copies of everything I'd seemingly lost on
CD-Rs, tapes, and even disks, but that would automatically ruin the
entire evening, I'd use that only as a last resort becuase it would BE
a last resort if I allowed her to get as far as getting me to the PC
in order to show her; I could simply flat refuse to do it and give her
a perfectly rational explanation, that would be the most forceful, but
it would also hurt her, she'd feel as though I'd not only broken a
promise to her (which I'd never made), but that I didn't trust her and
I could find it in me to sternly admonish her, no, I could not risk
that; I could do my best to occupy her all night and hope that she'd
just forget, but that was a long shot and I'm not a man to take risks
on my honour to an organization, so that was pretty much out; I could
be devious and act like this was some kind of big fuckin' deal, OR I
could just make her happy in only the way that getting exactly what
you want can accomplish, and FUCK my integrity, I wasn't born with
any, how the hell else did I end up a super-spook? Like my house had
been bugged and fixed and wired by the Local 454 and a team of spies
were watching my every move to see that I didn't do something that
they fucking frowned upon. Hell, I wasn't even really violating the
charter. Sometimes you just have to do shit you'd rather not and enjoy
it. Such is life. Besides, there was the remote chance, made only more
likely by her twenty-percenter status, that during this process I
could tap that box like a keg and get bottles of pure extract like
they SOMEHOW did on that weird cable show (whose name I cannot find
under any of the trash in my mind, it was one of those late-night
softcore porn shows, rather like a documentary of foreign bizarre porn
game shows and the like, it was announced by this dead-common female
Briton whose deep voice got so irritating that you wanted to smack her
with a pipe by the end of the show, and it was a series, shown on
either HBO or one of the Showtime channels, or perhaps it ran on both
or all three of them, but I know it was on at least one of those, and
it was on earlier this year, it may still be in repeats, it was the
one with the sickening Japanese game show where guys smelled women's
shoes and then crawled around and matched them up to the wearers, as
well, I BELIEVE, the naked guy with leopard spots tattooed all over
him and the shaved head, as well as the UK public service ad cartoon
called "Willy Use A Billy" at the very end while the credits were
rolling. If ANYONE can tell me anything useful about this programme,
what the name of it was, if you're certain, what episode or volume or
number it was (they had at least two versions, both with a lot of
similarities, same dead-common announcer, but all different clips), if
there is anyone who has it taped and might make me a copy for a stingy
thirty bucks (if you have it we can negotiate), or anything else
related in any way to the programme, including if it was definitely on
only one of those channels or if you know it was on more than one,
which, PLEASE post or email be the information at my only working
email address, coa...@bemail.com, you WILL be handsomely rewarded) I
saw some time ago which had a clip from somewhere in the Netherlands
where some incredible woman put out enough precious fluid (it most
certainly was NOT piss, though to someone who was not paying close
attention to the subtitles it could be mistaken for same, esp. as the
bottles were yellow in colour) to fill like three empty beer bottles,
and on the screen they were saying something about how easy it is with
practice to extract several liters at a go, and had a silent woman in
there positioning the bottles, which filled extremely rapidly, I have
no idea what they DID to that woman who could put out so copiously,
but in all my years I have never heard of such a technique and
hypothesize that it must have been done using a special aphrodisiac.
If I got the secret to doing that I could forward the information to
the ACS headquarters and cut research costs by hundreds of thousands
for the collection project and also submit the first samples and get
credit for it. I am not a man obsessed at all with recognition, in
fact, one of my mottoes is "_bene qui latuit bene vixit_", "Well has
he lived who has lived in obscurity," but gaining credit for unlocking
_that particular secret_ would be incredibly fulfilling and it would
move the collection and identification project almost into reality,
something that every member nationwide is excited about. But to quote,
"All right! First things fucking last -".

I turned down the stereo for the second time in this story and fired
up another conversation, increasing my speed to a little over eighty
with ease. Engaging Krista, I asked her what was on her mind. "Nothing
for the moment, I had been thinking about what this all was going to
be like before you turned the radio down, interrupting my train of
thought. What's up?" "Well, I wanted to see whether or not it would be
a good idea to talk about that." "How do you mean??" Truly puzzled.
"Well, I didn't know how you were approaching it, if you wanted to
know every detail of what was going to happen or if you wanted to be
delighted by the surprise. Which is it?" She didn't have to think hard
about this one. "Well, I want to the basics, but don't get really
technical. I find it strange that this is so engrossing to me, but it
is." "Go on, ask questions, that way I won't say too much and spoil it
for you." "All right," she said, pausing to take a drink from the huge
plastic cup, "what will be the phases of the, er, examination,
generally, and what order will they come in?" "Well, first I'll show
you around the collection and show you the three broad categories of
photos: Those which have been measured up as accurately as the photo
allows, those few which have been verified to exact specifications,
and those who have not yet been examined or do not have any
accompanying photographic evidence from which to make calculations for
yardsticks of sorts with which to measure. Then I'll take one of those
from the latter category which can be easily scaled and measured, and
I'll show you how THAT is done, really shouldn't take that long. After
that, assuming you still want to explore your own personal
specifications and measurements and take a prominent place in my uh
gallery, if you will, first I'll take a series of scans covering your
entire anovaginal region from several different angles, some of which
will be scanned along with tiny metal flat rulers placed strategically
for best guidance in referencing them, and then I'll manually take
your measurements, creating a personal fingerprint-like personalized
profile of you, I'll ask you some historical questions relating to the
topic, all of which are going to be irrationally rudely personal, and
I'll run some kinds of tests and record that data as well. Then I'll
just get your exact height and weight and a few additional
measurements, none so personal as the initial ones, and finally I'll
type in my own personal notes on your file, and I'm going to try to do
something which hasn't really been done properly before, and I have
only ideas about how I might go about doing it, I have all the
equipment and all the right containers but none of the scientific
knowledge or machinery to take the final steps, which would be, if you
can believe it, culturing and genetically reproducing absolutely
perfectly identical and scientifically indistinguishable bottles of
your own personal extract, since they'd be molecularly precise,
there's nothing anyone in the world could possibly do to tell a sample
of it apart from a sample you just produced in front of them. That's
the project that the ACA is currently researching, and if I could
prove that there was in fact a technique to produce abundant supplies
of the real thing and detail that description and some of the samples
over to them, the project would soon get wheels and become a reality,
and we could effectively catalogue and store individualized samples
from everyone who would volunteer, and in a short time get the
technology and knowledge base enough to get a system perfected for
creating these massive quantities of samples, just imagine it, for a
small, trifling fee, maybe fifteen bucks, by same-day mail you could
get not only a fully-detailed and most probably not at all
understandable report on what your own unique essence is made of, an
evaluation of the scent it gives off, staying power, everything there
is to know about it, AND, however much of it you wanted, you could
specify that you wanted like four perfume atomizers full of it, and
we'd put on whatever labels you desired, or, for extremely practical
applications, two-liter bottles like they sell soda in fitted with
pump caps for those who have problems producing enough for sexual
purposes, those poor sods, soda cans of the stuff in six-packs that
you could send to people like me for special occasions, or for people
in long-distance relationships, the possibilities are endless, and
we'd never divulge that what we're selling is a copy, because
technically it isn't, and no one could prove that it is, we'd have a
cover story that you volunteered to donate so much as you could over
such a period of time as to justify the amount contained in the
sample, hell, we could even mix samples with natural or artificial
scentless and colourless chemicals to produce everyone's own
personalized super-lubricant... It just blows my mind!" Krist had been
chuckling at my level of excitition for almost a minute and was still
laughing. "Hell, I'll do it in the name of science and mass-produced
personalized cum products!" I nearly missed an exit and severely cut
off cars in two lanes of traffic, though at my speed, unless they were
really paying attention, they probably wouldn't even have noticed, and
gingerly applied steady pressure to the brakes to slow the vehicle
down to a reasonable speed. I had plenty of reason for doing so, too:
my everything-detector started going off, indicating that in front of
me some pig had just turned on a radar gun, Ka-Band. I went the speed
limit for the exit, forty-five, and adjusted down to forty for the
stretch of road I was on which would soon turn to fifty, and then back
down to 45 after I turned onto Parker Road, which soon turned into
Highway 83, where it was an unenforced 55 where everyone did at least
ten over that. I looked around and spotted the pig, in a Jeep
Cherokee, which meant he was DCDSD, (Douglas County Deputy Sheriff's
Department) just putting on his lights to give some poor schmo without
the benefit of an everything-detector (everyone should have one, it's
saved my ass over a hundred times and more than paid for itself in
potential fines and/or loss of license, not to MENTION insurance
rates, which, I'm sorry to admit, I do have but only for the super
collision insurance that's an option to normal insurance, with the
detector I have in the Nissan, I don't have any kind of insurance
because it's damn near impossible to get pulled over because anything
that the pigs use to LEGALLY (not "I clocked you on my speedometer"
which ALWAYS dies in court, provided you are equipped with the right
attourneys, which of course I have) track your speed, EVEN IF THE UNIT
IS TURNED OFF IN THE PIG'S CAR, for up to about eight miles in all
directions even around power stations and radio transmitters which can
fuck over most radar detectors, is detected and the unit warns you of
it, where it is, what type(s) it is/are, and thus saves your ass from
getting caught) a ticket and a summons to jack up the insurance on his
car which he doesn't need (if I don't need any for my HOUSE...?)
anyway, and I laughed at him after announcing the famous film line,
"Oh, shit, it's the cheese..." in the hilarious wavering,
stoned-sounding, low and uneven gritty lament which sussurated from
the lips of Juliette Lewis playing the uglily-beautiful walking
contradiction of Mallory Knox in Oliver Stone's _Natural Born
Killers_, one of the few truly postmodern satires of its kind, a work
of slight genius, a puzzlebox of sorts chock-full of innuendo, hidden
messages, in-jokes, cultural admonishments, clichés used as emphasis
for comedic effect, bizzareity, and much more, including, my
favourite, sledge-fucking the putrid liberal newsmedia right through
its obscenely-large and unblinking eye socket for over a hundred solid
minutes and finally exploding cataclysmically inside it, scream of its
orgasm turns to death rattle and the crystal skull... Anyway, no
longer concerned with the cheese, I sped up to around sixty and dodged
traffic in my usual "Where the hell did he come from?/Where did he
go?" I'm-seeing-things method. I occasionally pass maybe ten or
fifteen cars on the right using the shoulder, as committing fifteen or
more semi-serious crimes all in the space of a couple seconds, if you
really think about it, which I do of course just to get the strange
sensation, is downright eerily seemingly impossible. I dart in and out
of spaces just large enough for the precisely
seventeen-foot-four-inch-long, six-foot-two-fifths-of-an-inch-wide
super-clean gleaming 1968 Dodge Charger using the power of the
fairly-well-hopped-up 440-cubic-inch (which was of course original)
engine, which I chose over a 426 Hemi (the undisputed king of engines,
and all Chevy owners with their 454s can just watch the fucking
taillights because that's all they'll ever see if they make the
mistake of challenging a well-tuned King Kong Chrysler 426 Hemi at the
strip, just taillights, and at least we made them fairly PRETTY
taillights for all the Chevy, Ford, and GM owners out there, even the
Corvettes with the 427 Rat Motors in them, which will suck even the
lightest smallblocks and hauling 454s up the dual exhaust and crap
them out before they even get into third gear, all bow down to the
King Of Engines, either the 426 or the new 528 Hemi crate motor, which
puts out 630 horses right bone-stock out of the factory, and folks,
don't let anyone tell you that the 440 won't run right alongside the
426 Hemi, or suck its doors off if you ran both cars for five thousand
miles without keeping super-close attention to the Hemi OR the 440,
because the 440 is fucking BULLETPROOF, it'll run with fouled plugs,
it'll run for sixteen thousand miles just as hard and strong and fast
as it did when it was new, but the Hemi will kill it if it's properly
tuned, but Hemis require _constant_ maintenace and tuning to keep them
running like the beasts they are, that's why I got a 440, even though
I know exactly HOW to tune those Hemis and have owned several before
(including a SUPERCHARGED 426 Hemi, which was not safe to drive on the
streets, it put out somewhere around nine hundred horsepower, would
run six-second quarters, and 0-60 was 4.12 seconds, and this was in a
fairly heavy car, a '66 Dart, 3,500 fucking pounds to sixty miles per
hour faster than a super-lightweight, over-engined Viper can do it,
and making a lot healthier rumbling doing it. That is, on the off
chance that one of us could get the car to go in a straight line when
we put the hammer down. I even had trouble controlling it, and I've
done more professional and non-professional drag racing that I got a
first place trophy out of than I can COUNT, the car was fucking
incredible. It had a rumble that would put a fucking FLEET of Harleys
to shame. You'd shake violently like you were inside a clothes dryer
when you were in racing harnesses snugged in as tight as you could,
your joints would hurt after you idled at a long stoplight, just
pressing ever-so-gently on the accelerator you'd leave behind some kid
in a hopped-up smallblock Chevy that you didn't even notice was there,
in that care you didn't care, because unless you were sitting next to
Don Garlits in a nitromethane Elephant-Motor reworked supercharged
Hemi dragster, it wasn't even fun it was so easy. We had to get tires
custom-made, the sons of bitches had to have been thirty inches wide,
quad pipes, damn, that was a car. They wouldn't LET us take on anybody
at the local strip in competetion, there WAS no class for
supercharged, hopped-up 426 Hemis. Fuckin' had that car today I bet I
could sell it for ninety K. I didn't keep it longer than about eight
months because in that time I went through fifteen hundred dollars in
tires, and that was a LOT back in 1968, and I just couldn't afford to
keep it. Hell of a car, though), try imagining a supercharged 528
Hemi. All it would do is sit and burn the tires up. that's all you
could do with it. The fuckin' thing would have well over a thousand
and a half horsepower and almost as much torque, you'd have to make it
all-wheel-drive and steer it with a big fin because if you got it
moving the steering wheel would feel like it wasn't connected to
anything, and it wouldn't do a damn thing no matter where you turned
it. The tires would have to be made of some sort of gel-like material
mixed with superglue and fuckin' titanium spikes jutting out every
other inch and you could race it across a crop and the farmer would
pay you because he could plant his wheat in all the holes you dug. If
it had a manual transmission the clutch would be like kicking in the
door to a safe. Ahh, stop dreaming, back to the story:) for
now-painfully-obvious reasons. Someday I just might slap a
supercharger onto this sucker, if only for the increased gas mileage
provided by better fuel handling and finer, purer sprays. I would
weave and hover strangely between cars and trucks and SUVs and scare
the living fuck out of motorcycles, I occasionally turn into one of
those wanna-be-humans who drive bicycles ("Oh boy! Let's try to travel
efficiently using the transportation technology of 1816 and wear
impossibly tight shorts showing off our fat, ungainly asses and
detailing our lilliputian, almost invisible to the naked eye genitalia
down to each of our four half-a-nanometer-thick pubic hairs and
ridiculous-looking helmets lest we fall off at the frightening ten
miles per hour our stubby little shaved legs and tiny cute feet can
propel us, but only with a hundred-kph tailwind going down a
fifty-degree hill, of course! Hyuk!") dangerously (for them) close to
the sides of the road, thinking that they're going somewhere,
sometimes I just barely nudge them, other times I really _whip_ the
car into them, in most cases they go flying a good ten foot into some
shrubbery, or, if I'm lucky, a gravel pit or down a steep hill into a
construction site, I do this not compulsively as much as I do it out
of habit, when I have a passenger, I get them to kick open the door
with both legs, which usually flips the bike width-wise instead of
end-over-end if I can't reach 'em with the side of the car. So far,
not one has even slightly scratched or dented my car, not even that on
who was roaring down the sidewalk when I was stopped in the
far-left-hand turn lane and up comes this crouched-over (yeah, you
need aerodynamics at thirty mph) with this idiotic poker face on and
wraparound knockoff sunglasses, I timed it just perfectly right and
slammed open my door, that motherfucker went in a huge beautiful arc,
UP about fifteen feet high, ACROSS about thirty-five feet, in a
perfectly straight line, I heard him yelling almost like in a cartoon
it was so surreal, you heard it just barely and then it very rapidly
got extremely soft, he hit the ground right on his ass, must have
skidded for twelve foot like he was on ball bearings but not as
smooth, his legs went out straight in front of him so the momentum
picked him stright up balancing on one foot and then the same momentum
sent him onto the grass right on top of that three-inch-high really
thin steel partition they use in landscaping to keep the rocks from
moving out into the lawn on his side, goddamnedest thing you ever saw.
The bicycle itself crumpled like a tin can and went the opposite
direction (in front of me and behind the direction he was going when
he hit) about five or six feet, but he must not have had those
remarkable soft rubber tires completely inflated, because all it left
on my car door was a dust-mark where the tire hit, and it looked all
deformed, like blown out at the sides, who knows, maybe the impact
popped his tire and that left a snapshot of a semi-deflated tire on my
door. I used a rag I kept in the back of my car to rub it off, and it
only took five seconds of rubbing and you couldn't tell anything had
hit that car at all. They DO NOT make 'em like they used to. No
fuckin' way they do. Do that in a Geo Metro (well, hypothetically,
since in a Geo all the doors automatically lock after the car goes
over nine miles per hour, it's idiotic, but guess who started this and
all other idiotic car mishaps? Ford. In fact, short story for you why
Ford retracted their design for the 9-mph auto door locks, it seems
that this "vacuum automatic door lock" generated thousands of
complaints from folks who bought cars equipped with these, went to
automatic car-washing stations, where you actually get out of the car
and it is moved along with rollers, in case you're not familiar with
them, they are very rare in CO, they had 'em back east, I know they
have 'em in CA, but anyway, after they got out of their cars and sent
them into the car washes, at a certain point along the line huge
rollers spun the wheels for the service of automated whitewall-tire
washing, and reached a relative speed of over nine miles per hour, the
doors automatically locked with the keys inside them (you had to,
because you had to leave the car running while it got washed, you see)
and at the end of the line, the owners had to call us locksmiths to
charge them a fucking fortune for a ten-second job with a Ford slim
jim that we made into a huge ordeal including drilling the lock
cylinders clean out, and offering to install a whole new
super-high-security lock for an extended price, and finally, "as a
last resort" popped the slim jim under the weatherseal on the window,
hooked the door lock latch, pulled up and there you have it, this is a
testament to miracles happening, the door somehow came unlocked, and
miracles and acts of ghod come at a serious price which is of course
non-negotiable, and if you refuse to pay we'll lock all the doors,
shove a key blank in all the locks and break them off with a pipe
wrench and you can damn well bust a window and get in that way, but
not with any of OUR tools, and, today only, we offer window and
sunroof replacement.... Ford went back to the drawing board and manual
locks, and the automats put up large signs forbidding cars made by Geo
into their carwashes because of liability issues) if you COULD do that
in a Geo Metro and the rubber tire would punch a hole clean through
the recycled-part-tin-part-aluminum-part-antimony-part-pig-iron door.
I laughed out loud as I remembered that sonofabitch flying into the
air and making a Gooney Bird landing (am I the only one here who
remembers that character from the Woody Woodpecker cartoon show?)
right finally on top of the steel landscaping partition, of all
places. "What the hell's so funny allasudden?" I detailed the entire
story of me and twinks on bicycles to her, ending with the famous
memory. She laughed good and hard and the (Parker) Road turned into a
Highway (83) as if by the musical tones of her pealing laughter alone.

About twenty minutes later we arrived at my home, I got in and quickly
dispensed with feeding the Mastiff, changing the water in the
incredibly large bowl, the largest bowl of any type I have in my
inventory, freshening it with some crushed ice and replacing it. We
had carried in the now-nearly-but-not-quite-empty 64-ounce cups free
from the gas station, and all the ice had melted, leaving a stale,
watery, confusing drink within them, mostly water with a little bit of
syrup, but thankfully all the carbonation was gone. It still tasted
rather sickly, I thought, and pulled off the lid and poured about ten
of those fluid ounces of bad noncarbonated crap out into the garbage
disposal. Pausing, I unconsciously wiped my eyes clear with my right
thumb and forefinger, sat down at the kitchen table and lit up a
smoke. Krista was wandering around the house, reminding me of
something very amusing that I noticed whilst standing on the patio of
someone's single-story ranch-type house (realtors misuse the strangest
words and apply them to the most disparate things...) at one of the
strangest parties I've ever been to in my life in Goodland, Kansas,
about twelve, maybe thirteen years back. It was difficult to describe,
it had different elements that added up wrong (you'll soon see what I
mean), it's almost as if it wasn't real, but I have documentation, and
it, too, is strange. The party was like half, a high-school
post-graduation party, with everyone running around trying and some
succeding to get laid, it was half Demolition Derby, half guerilla
warfare, had elements of the ORIGINAL Olympic games, half like the
opening of a new and unimportant exhibit in a museum nobody ever goes
to, with that kind of dusty overtone, atmosphere dry enough to cause
spontaneous nosebleeds, that "everything's-under-glass-comma-WHY?"
feel, people who were in reality poor dressed like the rich at a fancy
dress ball, but not by a damn sight everyone there, just as I said,
part of it, and you got that same
"Would-somebody-please-cut-a-loud-juicy-fart-to-enliven-the-festivities?"
undertone to it, and half of it was like some bizarre drug-addled
dream that you just can't explain how absolutely fucking strange and
improper it actually is. It was creepy. And quite a few people were
engaged in this sort of game that nobody really understood at all, in
which tools of the original Olympic games were used in an attempt to
place others in grave danger, but nobody was any good, so mostly they
would miss and destroy some part of the house as if it were theirs to
bust up, grab their shit, and continue, and on top of this, a few of
the people engaged in the sport were also engaged in this idiotic
sub-game of
"Let's-Find-Amusing-Places-To-Put-This-Plastic-Child's-Toy-Rake-With-Its-Long-Thick-Wooden-Handle-And-Then-Laugh-Hysterically",
certainly a classic. I remember them stuffing it up the tailpipe of a
car in the garage, lodging it horizontally in a small decorative
juniper tree, then laughing hysterically and eating the poisonous (I
think) berries what grew on the tree, laying the rake in the light
gray gravel driveway, pouring turpentine on it, lighting it ablaze,
and, there were like six of them, whipping out their cocks and
ferociously pissing out the fire, then one of them picked it right up
and rammed it through this guy's black cheap metal mailbox after
opening its lid, leaving it sticking in there, laughing hysterically,
then running off with it, completely insane, and as proof I knew I had
a page in a diary stroke events record log that I knew the description
of which I remembered having kept for a period of time definitely
including the party, which I know I wrote something about during the
party in. Folks, it took me two fucking DAYS, forty-eight HOURS, seven
packs of CAMEL WIDES to find this fucking little waterlogged-cover
book, and as proof of this party's existence, I will fully transcribe
the single page I devoted to the party that it took me an additional
hour and forty-three minutes to locate out of three hundred and
seventy-four handwriiten pages, the majority of which had been written
in a peculiar dark purple felt-tip pen, including this excerpt about
the party, though some of it was in black ballpoint and red felt-tip
as well, never fuckin' MIND that. One caution, though, at one point
there are deliberate line breaks surrounding a certain excerpt from
the excerpt, which is the line that I was reminded of by seeing Krista
ambling about the house as if looking for something but not knowing
what, and the spaces are more or less accurate with how the thing
looks on paper, but anyway, there is a dash and a parenthetical
remark, read that but don't misconstrue it as part of the original
text. Finally, ON WITH IT, here is the FULL transcription of the
diary-type entry (there were no dates, names, or anything, this thing
is hard to pin down) for your enjoyment:

"The party was dull and I had to step outside to have a smoke. The kid
with the sandblasted face followed me and we had a baby shower. I gave
him a wallet I bought at a pharmacy and then he gave me a ziploc bag
with a bunch of _huge_ --four to five times larger than the largest
size-- gumballs. "Funky" he said with an electric razor in his throat.
"Mondo," said I, with a strobe light pupil. We collided and continued
having an accident. I shook his hand full of chunky butter and guessed
as to the circumference of his wrist. He handed me a business card
with his name written all over it in green plaid ink. I stepped on his
foot and howled like a toucan. He nodded repeatedly and slipped on a
pair of sunglasses. I shook my shoulders in their sockets and withdrew
two cigarettes, one on each corner of my mouth, lit them, and threw
myself away.

Inside the music was howling and the wind was dying down. A crew-cut
gentleman was in a fistfight with a little girl and behind them was
John Wayne.

-(NOTE: the line below was done up in double-size, extra bold,
serif-font apparently for
emphasis, explanation following excerpt)-

I STARED IN THROUGH THE PATIO WINDOW AT AN OLD WOMAN WHO COULDN'T FIND
HER WAY OUT OF THE HOUSE.

Streamers were being thrown around in large numbers. I jumped back
from the window as it was shattered by a discus. I charged in through
the hole and tackled a skinny kid from Jersey City who was holding a
martini. I reached into my bottomless pocket and removed a
store-bought plastic ketchup container filled with gasoline and
spurted it all over him, yanking my Zippo out again and making his
life miserable. There were six naked coeds in the bathtub and a dog.

I whistled Dixie and ate a plate full of corn chips. It was going to
be a hell of a design conference."

There you have it. What is so strange and remarkable about this
particular page is that the line that I told you about, "I STARED IN
THROUGH THE PATIO WINDOW AT AN OLD WOMAN WHO COULDN'T FIND HER WAY OUT
OF THE HOUSE.", as it had obviously required a great amount of
concentration, effort, and time to create. It was certainly done by
hand, though you couldn't tell that at a glance. All of the letters
were perfect, all the lines on them straight as a string, even the
kerning (a term for the space constant between adjoining letters in
typesetting) was damn near perfect, (I took a digital micrometer and
measured because it looked so close. None of the kerning is off
throughout the entire line by more than 0.003"!) and the letters were
heavily serifed and more than bold, I discovered (this time using a
cool little printed-upon clear plastic sheet that comes in handy for
measuring just about anything under a foot long, it came in my box
that I got Corel 4 in, the only time they ever sent me a little tool,
I'm up to version 9 now and still waiting for another cool gimmick...)
that, had this been a computer font, the size measured in Points would
be exactly 64, and it would certainly be classified as bold or higher,
I looked through all my Corel books (toss in another four solid wasted
hours JUST FOR YOU GUYS, AND YOU DON'T FUCKIN' APPRECIATE IT ONE WHIT)
and I found that it is almost identical to the "Serifa® Black"
typeface from the Corel 7 font pack, or, more precisely, from a type
foundry called "Fundicion Typografica Neufville SA", and it had been
written completely in Small Caps, which are basically capital letters
three-quarters the size of regular capitalized letters. That was the
line which was going through my mind as I took a long drag on my smoke
and exhaled smoothly, tracing her moving figure with my pupils,
creating a dialogue inside my head like a snake does just before he
sheds his skin.

"Is there anything that you're looking for?" I queried innocently. She
muttered something that I could not for the life of me comprehend.
"What?" I got up to assist her. She was tearing through all the
cabinets around the little built-in desk upon which I did almost all
of my work with narcotics, by the old
128-bit-encrypted-line-as-well-as-the-other-three-lines phone, the
answering machine, the Rolodex, a simple clock which worked and also,
if moved in the correct manner, swung open on a spring revealing a
large cylindrical stainless-steel chamber, not so big around as it was
deep, almost five feet deep, and inside it I kept emergency rations, a
flashbang grenade, and a loaded Beretta Bobcat mini-automatic pistol,
cocked and locked. I figured it was an extra step of security since
most of what I did while sitting there would greatly tempt the
criminal mind and was illegal as hell, so I had both sides of the law
AND unexpected circumstances covered by that simple addition, a desk
calendar, a box of tissues, a letterbox of bills, a shelf containing
that encyclopaedia set that I told you about in this post, "Scoop It
All Into A Cardboard Box", in the second of the two paragraphs on this
here part of the post:
http://x30.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=474649631.1&CONTEXT=935837084.1212678184&hitnum=0

(I encourage you to go to the bottom, click on "Get All 5 Segments",
and read the entire thing, it's good, some assorted gaudy touristware
on another shelf and two painted plates worth five hundred bucks each
that I got for free somewhere. She was going through these cabinets
with wild abandon, seemingly at random, each time while pawling
through the contents of the shelves, muttering, "I know this is where
he found them LAST TIME, where the hell ARE they?!?". I tapped her on
the shoulder to no avail. I gabbed her around the abdomen, picked her
up, swung her completely around to face me, and slowly and loudly
asked again, "WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?" She thought a while and
responded, "You had a rack of lighters somewhere in here, I need a
lighter." "There's one on the fucking table!" She looked around me at
the table, incredulous that there might actually be a lighter ther
along with the ashtray, then, spying it, demanded, "I STILL want to
find that goddamn rack of lighters, just to satisfy my curiousity, now
where'd you put it?" I laughed fully at her insistence and showed her
to a cabinet that she had not yet gotten around to thrashing about in,
containing a big rack of cheap disposable translucent coloured
lighters without any fucking safeties made in Thailand for the Calico
company, in various pleasant shades. She picked out a red one and
tested it, the flame shot up almost five inches high. That's why I
like these lighters. they're not only the adjustable type that, with a
little know-how (no, I won't explain the process here, as it is a
trade secret and publicly posting it would endanger national security)
can be wrenched from a lighter that produces only one of those
Bic-type puny two-centimeter flames that always go out when the fan
hits them to a nice, raging three-to-four-inch-high,
hissing-like-a-gas-stove flamethrower that will not only light your
cigarette, it'll by ghod singe your hair, and that's MY KIND OF
LIGHTER. Actually I haven't met anyone who doesn't agree with me on
the subject of being completely opposed to those non-adjustable and
puny-flame-producing lighters. They're shit. Get a nice Zippo, a
Colibri Quantum, get a flame that won't go out in 500-mph winds and
will light not only in rain, but underwater (just IMAGINE how useful
that feature will be!), is adjustable to your individual elevation and
although the flame is largely invisible except in total darkness, you
can set its height accurately with the twist of a dial, and it'll
never fail! Anyway: Krista, very satisfied, closed the cabinet and in
one clean swipe (she's GOOD) removed the annoying-as-hell warning
label (which is not necessary and which I can PROVE is not necessary
as well as the Indonesian mind-boggler puzzles that some manufacturers
use as "safety devices" which are in effect THE most ridiculous
accouterment that the smoking or firestarting world has EVER seen, but
I won't go into all that) clean, without even some residual glue,
rolled it up halfway, set fire to it, and stuck it to the top edge of
the ashtray where it died a slow, agonizing flameful death and turned
to soot, the substance that makes the world turn. She still couldn't
smoke, not without a pack of cigarettes. She looked frantically around
the table, then scanned the counter, the kitchen counter, the island,
beneath her seat, the floor, everywhere, and got halfway up when I
just couldn't stand to watch it anymore and quickly placed the filter
of a pre-tamped Camel Wide betwixt her full lips. I think she went
into shock briefly right afterwards, recovered, repositioned, and lit
the cigarette casually with the large flame, though not singing her
hair. Damn. Not that I enjoy the scent of burnt hair in the least bit,
but the instant bleach that accompanies it in about 80% of cases is
definitely cool, and so is singing your eyelashes, because they ALWAYS
turn a cool colour at the tips, and it's very visible and ultimately
cool-looking, but burning your eyebrows, moustache, or beard means
that you're a fucking idiot, and burning completely off or shaving
completely off your eyebrows means that if I ever set eyes on you,
even if I'm standing in the middle of a police station, I'll lay a
beatdown on your ass so unforgiving and severe that you won't ever
walk again, and movement will be an option with a price for the next
fifty years. I won't kill you, that's guaranteed, because I want you
to, just in the purely literal sense of the word, LIVE with the pain
for the rest of your misbegotten life, then I'll shoot you up with
some poor-quality dope and deposit you inside the back of a police car
because you suddenly have all sorts of drug parephernalia in your
pockets and several winesses reported you as being strung-out and
screaming at everyone to give you money because you needed a fix, and
you'll be well-taken-care-of for a little while, at least. Anyway,
moving on, I went and sat back down next to her and finished my
cigarette, getting up again to grab something, anything to drink
what's cold, in this case some fairly old but still wonderful homemade
LIME KOOL-AID which I poured over crushed ice and drank heartily back
at the table. Finally, for the sake of conversation, I posed a
ridiculous question. "Hey, do you think I should shave strange
patterns into my pubic hair?" Without so much as blinking, she
replied, "Sure, I'll help. I've done this before and heard a lot about
it, so I know what you should shave and how to do it. Here, take down
your pants..." I cursed myself for choosing THAT line over all the
rest. I did as I was told, and was quite a bit more comfortable. The
house, strangely, was rather stuffy, whatever the fuck that means. She
handed her halfway-through cigarette to me, and I smoked it as slowly
as I could while she went over to the desk, in the area she knew from
having just been over there to ransack it, and fished around in a
little miniature two-tone vinyl golf bag what held all sorts of pens
and pencils, and returned with one of those blue medium-fine-point
extremely water-soluble Vis Avis (pronounced "Viss" and "Avis", like
the rental car company, of course as separate words, now you know)
pens, and I handed her smoke back to her. She took a couple drags
while leaning over in her chair to inspect the way of things, rested
the cigarette in a slot of the ashtray, and uncapped the pen, securing
the cap on the other end of the pen as is customary, and grasping it
in her right hand in the icepick grip and grabbed my sac with the
other, and instictively I cringed, briefly wondering what sin I
committed THIS time. There was no attack to my nether regions,
thankfully, and she traced elliptical, oblong closed shapes marking
off what areas to depilate manually, which consisted of an area
reaching horizontally from about three-quarters of an inch away
(meaning towards my knee) from the crease of my legline, on downwards,
covering all the hair in and around the crease except for just near
the top, where it curved in and down, leaving hair all the way out to
the crease for about an inch and a half. On the other side of this
shape, she traced a line which first extended in a small bulge to
eliminate the hair on the side of the part of my groin above the sac
which came in contact with my thigh when I walked and then, more in a
straighter type of line, followed the semicircular natural line of my
sac down and ending at the space where my perineum-hair blends with
all the rest, and looping around to form a complete closed shape, and
placed a large X inside the shape, set the pen down on the table,
finished her cigarette, and proceeded to make almost an exact flipped
duplicate on the other side of my groin, putting in the obligatory X.
I thought she'd be finished, but she just up and grabbed my prick and
started making another shape which effectively eliminated all of the
hair on my shaft all the way back to the base, except for underneath,
and she had a difficult time marking the skin through the very dense
hair on the sides of it near the base, THEN traced almost a complete
circle around the base of the member, again all except fot that on the
very bottom, the circle stood out (away) about a fifth of an inch. She
finished up, capped the pen, and pointed out that I shouldn't really
do much moving for about five minutes or the ink would smear, and,
pointing out the circular part around my cock, noted, "We'll have to
do most of that first with either a very small-tipped razor like a
nostril hair clipper or go at it with the toenail shears." Her tone
was serious. this worried me. "Uh, no toenail shears need be used, as
they are quite unforgivingly _pointy_ and _sharp_ at the ends,
instead, I have a rather odd little pair of very sharp, quite small,
very thin, bent handles, circular dull metal stampings in place of
where the uh points would be on a pair of shears, which I just now
learned the purpose of. Larger ones like that are for the removal of
tightly-wrapped bandages so as not to cut the patient or uh JAB him in
any way, the circular tips make that impossible from any angle you go
at it, and the blades are slightly curved, which makes sense now that
I think about what I've gotten myself into. So what, if any, are the
magical benefits of this procedure you're so familiar with?" She
spoke, her jaw resting on her chin, like a bored doctor of medicine,
semi-distant, soi-disant, "You'll have zero irritation when you walk
or sit or kick something or in any other way move your legs around,
sweat won't tend to collect in that crease there, which I know can be
annoying, nobody I've ever talked to has ever WANTED that hair on the
shaft, uh, you'll definitely look bigger, I'm thinking about a little
over an inch and a half, and the little circle part just looks cool.
Oh, and as long as you have a sharp shaving razor out, well, check
this out, surprised you didn't say anything before..." She actually
heated the parts of the zipper on the miniskirt through friction by
undoing it that fast. Indeed, she did have a slight stubble effect
going, in some areas about 2mm long already. I had no idea about the
rate at which hair grows back on the nether regions of the body, but I
know it's always different than a guy's facial hair, which is also
different depending on which guy you ask. I had to shave at least once
a day, twice made for an actually smooth face most of the time, though
I had grown a beard out each winter and had not noticed any gray
strands amidst the rest, even. I didn't even get to whine about
getting gray hair when guys in their mid-thirties, even, were soaking
their heads in some fucking tar allatime because they were vain and
ludicrous preening fags, gray hair is a sign of distinction in all
other civilized cultures, but over here, we all had to be fucking vain
and concerned with our appearance - Now I WAS THAT, but not like I'm
talking about here. Here I'm referencing those who have to pick up the
latest issue of a magazine in order to tell the barber how to cut
their hair. I'm talking about those who buy rings with gemstones most
closely 'complimentary' to the colours of ther eyes, which they must
not notice are actually on their heads and nowhere near their hands.
I'm talking about those fuckers who wear wide ties, period, in public
or private that's just revolting. I'm talking about those males and
increasingly females who save up enough money to buy an NSX and blow
it getting cosmetic surgery of any type including such worthless
things as breast augmentation and the removal of "cellulite", fat
which appear UNDER THE LEGS, for chrissake, half your life you're
SITTING ON THAT, you NEED some padding, but they PAY LOTS of MONEY to
have is SUCKED OUT, for reasons I, with my almost two hundred IQ and
thirty-five years in the business of finding out why other people do
certain things from the best teachers in the WORLD, will NEVER come
CLOSE to understanding, and they get lasers zapping the hair out of
their noses and perfect, bleached-white straight teeth and even things
so hideous they ought to put a man straight to death on the spot for
even pondering the procedure, such as: laser tattoo removal, gender
"changes", laying on a bed that pumps RADIATION into almost every pore
of your body so you can emerge with a fake and temporary slight TAN
(!!!), undergoing a form of surgical intervention by which, to remove
stomach fat, the stomach is cut open, sewn shut, and then a "tuck is
created", meaning, literally, "they tie a knot in your abdominal
wall", thus creating a Flesh Corset, which is, however, subject to
break and spurt your horrible old guts across the floor... All for a
society which demands it because they see people in excellent physical
shape in film and television, as well as people stupid enough to
actually consciously starve themselves as a contrast, and for some
ungodly reason the brainless viewers wish to emulate the fit young men
and women that any old asshole can see by flipping on his fucking
television and probably does not wish to see in absolutely everyone
else around him, those people who make up "society" are the same who
go through these radical, inordinately expensive, and thoroughly
useless procedures on an alarming basis just so they can look like
everyone else and not stand out because they'd die of shame ("Dying of
shame is an accomplishment peculiar to Kwakiutl Indians and Americans
- others simply say "_Zut alors_" or "_Son cosas de la vida_" or
"Allah fucked me, the All Powerful...." " -WSB, _NL_, P133). No, this
is america. Gray hair means not that wise and powerful, but that
you're old, weak, dying, and unattractive, and balding is worse,
supposedly, though I'd never know because I still have a full head of
healthy hair because some curse was placed on me so that I can't ever
bitch about any of the things that guys only a little more than half
my age will be bitching about, buying wigs, getting hair TRANSPLANTED
like it's BLOOD or something you NEED to LIVE, up until the blessed
day that they die. Well, I'm older than most guys who have gray hair
and bald spots, and I'm in supreme physical condition, I don't feel
any different today than when I was thirty-five, I'm too fucking mean
to die, and inbetween cheating death, beating the shit out of
footballers, and living life to its fullest, here I am almost
constantly up in some pussy, so all of you insecure, vain,
defenseless, weak, pouty, complaining, crotchety balding gray-haired
little kids yen years younger than I am CAN SUCK MY COCK because
you're just boring old rotters brainwashed by society into thinking
that you just can't DO certain things anymore at "this highly advanced
stage in life" while someone technically old enough to have fathered
you is out there doing more than you ever thought of doing when you
were in your twenties because in this life there are winners and there
are those who succumb to societal pratfalls of looming insecurity and
all that other horseshit that I always had the common sense enough to
just laugh off like the idiotic joke it was and remains to be, growing
more and more childish and moronic as the years go by. There may be a
slight chance that the reason that I'm fighting society so fucking
hard and WINNING is because I have ENERGY, and, to quote one of the
greatest minds in punk rock, "Anger is an energy", for it gives me
both a reason to fight and the energy to fight in the same way I've
always fought anything: FIGHT TO WIN or don't show up, and I ALWAYS
show up and I've never lost. Think about that, you lazy, genteel sons
of bitches, think hard about that.

A little while later on down the line, Krista announced that I was
ready, even though I didn't really FEEL ready for such a strange
undertaking to the male mindset in general, and, while allowing me to
lead her up to where the proper supplies were kept, she spontaneously
asked me a question that, coming from anyone else, would have been
fairly annoying: "Give me a random quote, the best one you can come up
with in the next five seconds." I thought and picked the perfect one,
loudly drawling with bravado AND sincerity, " 'Jesus, Homer, what
kinda creep joint you running here? I been gang fucked.' -Burroughs."
Krista laughed all the way up the stairs. I fished around in drawers
in the bathroom until I found the small, low-profile, circle-pointed,
curved, bent-handle shears I had received in a set of matching shears
as a free gift with any order over $200 from Smoky Mountain Knife
Works, from whom I regularly order everything from J.A. Henckels brand
ceramic kitchen cutlery (some of the very best) to sharpening stones
and knife-display pieces, as well as the odd knife or two just to
bolster the collection. They were fine shears, all of an unknown
brand, marked "MADE IN CHINA" (95% of the world's shears are made
somewhere in China) and all eight of them had this nice gray smooth
finish on them, very comfortable handles, with textured, non-slip
rings large enough to accommodate even MY thick fingers on even their
smallest pair. they were well-strewn about the house by now, I had
received them three years back, and found different uses for them but
lost their holster which told me what they were for, but I remember
the markings on the plastic sleeves, but cannot put a face to the
name, so to speak, or remember what order they were in by looking at
them. I have one pair of poultry shears, one pair of blunt nail
clippers, one pair of curved nail clippers, one pair of blunt carpet
shears, one pair of "medical intubation instrument", which sounds like
a very frightening object, but which I realized is the odd-bladed
instrument which I am now holding, one pair of large straight shears,
one pair of floral stem cutters, and one pair of heavy-duty shears,
which are a copy of the now-famous Miracle Shears, the kind what cut a
penny in half once for TV and then won't cut wet spaghetti and are the
most short-lived tool anyone can ever own. I've been using mine as a
cigar cutter, because they make two types of cigar shears, the
duckbill sort and the square-shank sort, and these look almost exactly
like they were made from a mould of the latter, and they don't do a
bad job slicing off cigar tips. I inspected the fairly diminutive
shears and decided it would be for the best if I soaked them first in
some alcohol, they appeared to have plant matter or something much
worse on them. Luckily I had a throwaway Petri dish that I have no
idea how I acqured that I'm using as a soapdish. I took it, used hot
water to wash the soap residue chunks off, but didn't spend much time
doing so, because, in sanitizing something, what harm can some soap
do? I opened the mirror, extracting some generic isopropyl rubbing
alcohol and filling the dish almost to the top with it, held the
shears first under rushing hot water to clear away the debris and
particles, then opened them and dunked them in their bath for the next
ten minutes of their life. Krista listed off supplies she'd need and I
fetched them and set them out. Ghrist, this was a full-scale
operation! I had out an electric beard and moustache trimmer with all
kinds of settings and attachments for it, my standard shaving razor, a
Gilette Mach 3 with a fresh set of blades popped onto it, alcohol
swabs, a medium-sized towel, a can of Gilette shaving foam, some
aftershave gel (Old Spice, I didn't even know I had it, much less one
with an expiration date not yet expired) in a dispenser, a styptic
pencil (I collect them, too), a plain electric razor with a pop-out
trimmer for sideburns or something, a dish of extremely hot water I
made sure to keep well away from my exposed crotch, now having removed
all clothing below my T-shirt, and finally, now that they were ready,
the shears, which I noticed had one almost invisibly-finely fully
serrated blade, like hairstyling shears have, making it so that you
can cut a hair by holding onto it and just passing the open blades
through it without all the snipping, that also left no sharp hair
ends, which was VERY important in this area. At last, the ceremony was
about to begin. She knew what she was doing, instead of going for some
hot water and foam and the razor first, which not only would have
washed away the markings before we could use them, but also wouldn't
have sone much of a job on long, thick hairs like that, so she went
for the shears, of all things, and not the electric jobbies, and
started in.

Now I don't give a good fuck how many eighteen-year-old pricks
broadcast over the internet that having a similarly-exposed member of
the opposite sex trim your pubic hair is some kind of amazing arousing
experience, this only goes to show that they've never even gotten
CLOSE to a real cunt in their lives, much less found one with a wild
hair up her ass (maybe literally? I'd soon find out...) to start going
after your genitals with sharp and dangerous objects, because if they
had, they'd admit that it scared the piss out of them. While hardly
anything can really frighten me since I'm so used to getting very
shocking news, being in combat situations, and doing things that would
scare any sane man to death without worry, this experience with the
sharp objects so near to the groin had me about as far as I can get on
the edge of distress. I'm not complaining, but when someone pinches up
fingerfuls of pubic hair, yanks them up to expose exactly from what
follicle they're coming from, and then runs the blades of a very sharp
pair of hooked shears as close as they can get to the skin itself, and
the hairs pop away seemingly one by one, AND THEN every once in a
while gets TOO CLOSE to the skin and actually cuts it and it bleeds
like nuts (no pun intended, but, while I'm on that topic, I hope one
of you gets the bright idea to shave your sac, trust me, it'll be a
lot of fun. First you go around everywhere fiercely scratching your
balls raw until the hairs grow in, then, because of the type of skin
they're in, they don't grow up through the sheath of the follicle,
they actually pierce and make their way through the skin, all as
ingrown hairs, and now you have terrible pain as well as even WORSE
itching, it reputedly gets worse by the day until all the hairs are
completely grown back, and that takes for-fucking-EVER, and then the
ingrown hairs occasionally catch on your undergarments and rip
themselves free, and all the while every time you take a walk, sit
down, stand with your legs together, run, or any similar activity,
your sac sticks to either thigh, and on occasion the light coat of
sweat that formed there to make it stick via what's called capillary
traction dries on you and you have to spray cooking oil on it so you
don't just rip off a few layers of scrotal skin, further irritating
the ingrown hairs... BARRELS of fun!) and your helpful fucking klutz
partner helpfully applies an alcohol swab to the area, sending
shooting pains throughout your groin in very ...interesting... ways,
then jabs at the already sore wound with the sharpest part of the
styptic pencil on its entire face, and the genital skin, being so soft
as it is floating there on a layer of water and fat, is not easy to
transfer the hard wax of the pencil to the wound, and occasionally you
get a gonad stabbed in a missed opportunity, I mean it's fucking
torture for the first little while while you get used to it! I endured
the slow scraping of the cold scissor blades up against a goodly
portion of both sides of my groin -she did both sides at a time, she
told me, "to get them even", as if I was going to go around and say to
people, "Hey, wanna see how evenly and accurately-trimmed my pubic
hair is?" (though I may now in the future, having thought of this...)-
slowly watching nearly-bare spots being hacked out of the jungle down
there, but every time she switched sides, "to get a more complete
view," she told me, this meant she had to manipulate my genitalia
around (read: rack my package around like a gearshift in a drag-race)
and stretch it in one direction and then the next, and my poor body
had no fucking clue what was going on or how to react, trying to
figure out if some strange form of masturbation is going on or if it's
being beaten on by woodland creatures or if someone's trying to
unscrew it or ghod-only-knows-what, by the time she had more or less
finished with the side areas and moved on to the little circular bit,
my pecker had set a new world's record for situps if not won some
awards for what is called "break-dancing". All of the clipped hair was
drooped onto a moistened tissue in the vain hope that it would
generate static electricity or something and being wet would somehow
cause the hair to just stick to it for easy disposal, and of course
this did not work as planned, and the quite sizeable pile of clippings
finally toppled and started worming its way into parts of the
terrycloth towel from which it could never be lodged. In a stroke of
semi-genius, I grabbed a lighter off of the counter and set fire to
the pile, making sure to breathe through my mouth. All it did was
since some of the pile and really reek up the room, so bad we had to
open windowsand spray assorted household chemicals around the room to
replace the stench. The fate of the lighter could have gone one of two
ways, and I'm glad it went the way of being thrown down the hallway
with great force, or else right now every time I slid around in my
chair, that would engage the sparkwheel against the flint and depress
the gas lever, and a five-inch flame would issue briefly from my
asshole. Finally, after thirty exasperating minutes, the hard part was
over for both of us. Trimming that circle neatly and cleanly involved
a whole hell of a lot of work because the space to be shaved didn't
allow enough room for the razor's head to move in any direction if it
could fit in there, so tweezers (+40 pts. for use of word) were
employed and the area was detailed hair by hair, some of which were
simple yanked out, which is not something I suggest ever trying even
if you THINK you have a high threshhold for pain, or even worse, you
KNOW you do. To make the circle visible, a bunch of overlapping hairs
had to be trimmed down so they'd remain in their own territory. Using
the corner of the beard and moustache trimmer at its supposedly
"sub-skin" depth level, she slowly carved and distinguished the
circle, and the trimmer didn't do too bad a job of not leaving any
stubble or missing certain hairs. She was getting a bit too excited
about preening me and decided to give the circle "Full definition" by
using each one of the trimmer's depth settings to "sculpture" the
main mass of pubic hair into a horseshoe-like-but-three-dimensional
shape, leading the length of hair gradually up (or is it down?) to the
point where it comes to (I'm not fucking joking) a "beveled edge" and
then shows off the shaved circular pattern in incredibly high contrast
to the rest of the hair. The thick, dense hair on the side of my dong
was about the hardest to get off, requiring a lot of time with the
shears, many passes with the electric razor (which felt ever so queer
in that area), and two sets of 360º directional passes with the
shaving razor (one pass coming in from every angle, one pass pushing
out from every angle, and two slow, deliberate 'thinking' strokes
trying to move the blade in such a path as that it's cutting against
the grain for each hair all along the path), hot water (agh!) foam,
and then taking several minutes to use the power of the water pressure
of the steaming faucet and a little careful finger-work (she was about
to use a toothbrush to try and swipe some of the hairs out, but if one
little shaving of that thin but strong plastic, which by then had been
sharpened on every side incredibly, stuck in the razor and was then
lost in my forest of hair, I would be in the most incredible pain for
as long as it took me to find that almost-microscopid invisible piece
of plastic and, using a scalpel, slit the skin around it so it could
come out of its fully-buried position, I had to get up to stop her
from doing that, and I couldn't get up and stop her fast ENOUGH once I
got to thinking about it, and she never even picked the toothbrush up,
but if I hadn't been thinking... ugg) to dislodge the carpet of cut
hair stuck between the three blades and the housing, and of course
wash off the foam, which carried just as much hair. I began to idly
wonder if this was going to eventually lead to the successful clogging
of my sink, and began to chuckle at the very thought, that is, until
those incredibly fucking sharp blades once again were pressed really
hard against the very loose yet pulled taut, incredibly thin and very
close to some serious veins penile skin, where one good nick would
necessitate the constant use of a miserable condom to protect the
would from further abrasion during almost any sex act, but for some
reason this turned out to be the only area where we never had to have
the following conversation: "Oops..." "Um, what does "Oops" mean? What
did you do?" "Oh, nothing, I just caught something wrong..." "Does
that mean I am bleeding again? TELL ME WHAT FUCKING "Oops" MEANS!"
"Well, here, uh, look for yourself, it's not THAT bad..." "Where? This
one? No, that's an old one... This one? No, that's scabbed over...
HOLY SHIT YOU DID _THAT_ TO ME??" etc. etc. ad infinitum. Then came
the electrical shaving of the side parts, which was made super-easy by
the still-intact blue lines, and after the electrical part was done,
she repeated the same
innumerable-passes-with-the-blade-pausing-to-add-water-and-foam-inbetween-each-innumerable-stroke
method, which was effective I believe only because, by coming at it
from every imaginable angle both backwards and forwards with not one
but THREE exceedingly-sharp blades you're pretty much guaranteed a
completely smooth depilation of any area. I checked the clock as she
was about to go for the third-to-last 'thinking' stroke with the razor
over on the right hand side, in which she got incredibly close to the
surface, inspected each remaining bit of hair, used the end of a Q-tip
coated in petroleum jelly to touch the hair, whereupon it would stick
to the end of the Q-tip, lift it carefully, and see in which direction
she had to cut with the blade to lift those last obnoxious hairs and
cut them well below the follicle line. These last few strokes were
really nuts, the blade spun in both directions twice before even
completing the trip halfway, then kind of moved as one would a
squeegee in wiping water from a window for the final top hairs.

One single irritating hair remained. She gave it the three-sixty
attack, no luck, she swabbed it, it was too short to swab, it was so
short and bend at just the right angle to be too wiry and strong to
lift. She tried in vain to tweeze it and ended up pinching me bad
enough to make me seriously consider pounding her, she thought about
it, then got a piece of dental floss, cut it into a short length, and
pulled it apart (it was made of a whole bunch of smaller strands,
getting thinner and thinner with each layer shed, and settled on a
very thin size, thought a little more, tried wetting the superthin
filament invisible to me, using, well, not using her tongue or the
faucet, she later explained that she thought this would lend a stiffer
composition to the tiny thread, and finally told me to hold on just a
short while and "we" could wrap this up, she fetched the lighter she
had chucked down the hallway, used the open blade of the small shears
to shave off a fairly large chip of soap, poured the alcohol out of
the Petri dish, dried it with a tissue, set the chunk of soap in there
and started shaving off more and more soap into the tough glass dish,
and then I realized what she was doing and again remarked on how
field-expedient, resourceful, and innovative she was as well as being
just pig-headed enough to make every recruiter's dream of a field
agent, but I knew better than to bring it up again, and then, with
quite a lot of soap in the dish, took it INTO THE SHOWER, which I did
not understand, set it down, came back, went through the cabinets,
grabbed some cotton balls, and the alcohol, and then very worriedly
started reading the fine print of the backs of the labels of the
household and bathroom cleansers. I had it. She knew she couldn't melt
the soap very easily just holding the lighter on it, all she'd do is
burn herself. So she put the wax in a dontainer that wouldn't spill or
ignite and was going to light a really hot chemical fire under the
dish by soaking a bunch of cottonballs in whatever says, "Keep out of
reach of open flame." or "Caution: Flammable." I could just fucking
save her day. I called over to her. "Listen, you can make an extremely
hot-burning and long-lasting flame if you soak those cottonballs in
exactly what I tell you." "You can? I can? Tell me, and how." "Calm
down, if you don't calm down you'll probably end up engulfing us in
toxic flames. Now the chemicals I'm going to tell you to use, when
mixed together, are not going to like it very much and will start
emitting toxic, repeat, DEADLY FUCKING FUMES into the air. I'll tell
you in what order to put them in so that you have the most time to get
the fuck out of that shower stall, becaus once it goes up it'll be
worse than a gas chamber in there. Open that cabinet to your left.
Remove the very small red metal bottle with the yellow sign on it
reading "Goof Off", and set it behind you. Got it? Yeah you do. Now
get out the tall thin can that's white with a lime green lid on it
marked "DOW Bathroom Cleaner, set it behind you. What else is in that
cupboard, um, is there a cardboard canister of S.O.S powdered cleaner
in there?" "Yeah!" "Get it, close the door, and go to the third
cabinet over, right hand side. No, the next one, yeah, that, that
door, get the Brasso out of there, it should be right up front. Yeah,
that's it. Set it behind you. Close the door. Get everything together.
Got it?" "Yeah," a bit hesitant and still in some kind of rush. That's
good, it's realistic, if she ever took my advice this would cound as
practical training in using field-expedient chemical combustibles, a
skill that not everyone has. "What should I do?" "Take five cotton
balls and press them down into the holes of the center of the shower
drain to make as tight a circle out of them as you can. I can't see
you, I can only take your word. Are they all touching one another?"
"Yes." "Good. Is the circle smaller than the Petri dish?" "Yes."
"Great. One last thing, are ALL those cottonballs pressed down as flat
as you can get them without pushing them clear down the drain?" "They
are now. What next?" "Now we're about to start doing things really
fucking fast, I'll make sure my words are loud and clear and you do
EXACTLY what I say, AS I say it, can you do that?" "Yes I can." "Okay!
Take the alcohol, unscrew the cap, CAREFULLY pour one capful of
alcohol into the alcohol cap! Distribute that alcohol from the cap in
a crossed pattern through the sides and center of the cotton! Take
another capful, pour it around the perimeter, the outside-most edge
of the cotton, when you are done tightly screw the alcohol cap back on
the alcohol bottle! Take the cap off of the Goof Off, use your teeth
if you have to! You are now handling Xylene, an incredibly combustible
substance that gives off lethal vapours when burned! Other chemicals
can sit on top of the Xylene, so dabble it liberally throughout the
entire area of cotton, DO NOT POUR IT! When you are finished slam the
cap back down as hard as you can with the heel of your fist and grab
the Brasso! You can take the cap off with your fingers, but as soon as
that bottle is open to the air that you are now breathing you WILL be
breathing TOXIC fumes! Open the bottle and liberally pour the Brasso
over the majority of the cotton, it needs about one second to soak in,
then add a final few dabs, slam the cap back on, and pick up the Comet
powder, this powder will chemically react with the Brasso to form a
long-burning and highly combustible composition. Shake the fuck out of
that can and distribute as much of the powder evenly over the cotton
area as you can in four seconds of shaking! Now get the Dow Bathroom
cleaner, HURRY YOU'RE GOING TO KILL US BOTH, _MOVE_! Shake the can of
Dow Cleaner as good as you can, hold the can six inches away from the
center of the cotton, LIGHTLY DEPRESS the button on top of the can,
spray a smooth, thin layer of foam from the center to the edge of the
shower and back again, throw the can away, get the Petri dish, set it
SLIGHTLY OFF-CENTER so oxygen can ventilate from under the drain TO
the fire and keep it breathing, back off, keep backing, get your
lighter ready, get flat on the floor, get only your hand close to the
line of foam you just made, light it, immediately retract your hand
and slam the door shut NOW!" I reached behind me and turned on a
fairly big and powerful floor fan. "Grab a small towel, get it wet,
cold water, wring it out, fold it in half, and breathe through it talk
through it eat through it until I tell you otherwise!" She did this as
natuarally as anyone could have. "Start unlocking and opening all of
the windows that open in this room and turn the fan on in the shitter.
That composition you made looks like it's going strong and steady,
good fuckin' job, you acted completely like a professional. Now that
shit's going to burn out in approximately six minutes or less, and
that soap will only stay molten for *no longer than five usable
SECONDS* after the fire goes out, and the fumes will still be there,
so you desperately need that towel over your face but you also need
two hands and more would be better. TELL ME YOU DIDN'T LOSE THAT
STRING!" She laughed from beneath the rag and I could barely bake out
"I took good care of it!" and watched her extract the
damn-near-invisible five-inch-long bit of filament from between her
other set of lips. Capillary traction, an item so small made from an
absorbent fiber would have stayed there even if she ran a mile or so,
smart thinking. "Okay, can you see the string if you lay it on that
black marble countertop?" "Sure." "Then do that, and surround it with
a fence of Q-tips or make an arrow pointing at it with the toothbrush
or some shit like that so you can find it in an awful hurry, which
could be any second now and you still don't have that towel tied on
securely or at all!" She had finished marking the location of the
filament and also laid the tweezers (+40 pts.) she was going to use to
completely wax-coat the entire tiny filament, for what, I had no
fucking clue, but we'd damn sure gone to enough trouble for it that I
wouldn't care WHAT she did with it. She was ransacking the cabinets in
the john for something to tie the towel on with. I had to help her
out, that fire was just starting to flicker. "Over here! Farthest
cabinet to the bathtub, left hand side, inside the pink plastic box,
right on top you'll find the answer to your question. Get those shears
ready, your five secods of opportunity is VERY QUICKLY approaching!" I
was having a noticable effect on her. Instead of being nervous, she
simply did everything much faster, before I could finish saying it.
That's what I wanted. She had already securely adhered the towel with
one lash of adhesive tape on the top, going over the bridge of her
nose, in contact with the towel as much as it could be, it was already
clipped off and secured tightly, and another strip below the chin up
around the top of the head, locking the towel pretty firmly in place.
I coughed at the thick air and congratulated her and told her to get
on standby with the filament in one hand and the tweezing apparatus in
her right, becuase she'd have to yank open the door pretty hard and if
she dropped the filament we were fucked but if she dropped the
tweezers she could pick them up and only lose a second or two at the
most. She stood by the opaque door, watching the incredibly intense
fire get nice and predictably lower, her right hand on the door just
in case, and I noticed the fire making stammering gestures, which it
would only do if it was just about out of fuel to burn. "GO! NOW!
CLOSE YOUR EYES! TRUST ME!" As soon as I had uttered the first
syllable the door came flying open and she went charging in there
completely blind from avoiding eye contact with the
quickly-dissipating smoke as the fire had died the instant she opened
the door, and to help her out I reached behind me without moving more
of my body than I had to, grabbed the slightly-heavy fan and aimed it
in and up into the smoke, causing a complete flush as the fire had
burned so intesely that it consumed its fuel cells (the cottonballs)
and the chemicals had been the sole fuel for the fire, so there was
absolutely nothing LEFT which could produce smoke, vapours, or
anything else harmful, it was just one burst of toxicity and then it
was all through. With the ungainly fan in both hands trying to keep
still I come near break my back redirecting the initial smoke out the
open windows, swinging it from one window bay to the other using only
my abdominal abductor muscles and shoulders. "Done!" I heard her yell
from inside the shower, coming out, and placing the fragile but
hard-earned completely wax-coated superfine thread filament that we
had gone through ALL this trouble to produce, and I gave the place a
good fifteen minutes to air out before I let the towels down. During
this time she had turned the shower itself on hot and aimed the head
directly covering the spot where all the burning had taken place, and
the drain was chrome and the floor was a ceramic tile, so the only
thing permanently blackened was the grout. After I was certain that
the room was sufficiently aired-out, Krista
ripped off the damp towel and adhesive tape and flung it into the
bathtub with a resounding thumping sound. I hucked mine over there as
well, and by now my legs were cramping up BAD from having stayed in
this same position for well over an hour. Up until now I had just
ignored the pain my legs were complaing to me with, and I felt like
ripping up the semi-low-pile gray carpet using only what I could
clench between my fingers and the heel of my hand, and I was certain I
could do it but I had to reason to. I had waited damn near forty
minutes for a single fucking hair, the last one standing, to be given
a fucking ceremony complete with a fire sacrifice and naked people
running around like at one of those fucking moronic backwards pagan
displays of idiocy, going to possibly (I'll never in my life say about
any kind of incredibly drawn-out process that it had been done in the
slowest, most painstaking and time-consuming way, because I've won
numerous bets on that topic, I can make the process of turning on an
electric tin opener just briefly to see if it's still working into a
twenty-year campaign which undoubtedly would make the news several
times. NOTHING cannot be outdone, another one of my mottoes which I
practically live by and prove constantly to be true) one of the most
involved and pedantic rigmaroles simply in order to generate a
sustance which would but delicately and slightly considering its size,
stiffen a very humorously miniscule strand of fiber which I had no
fucking guesses as to how she intended to use it, what for, how it
might get rid of that tiny but outstanding hair, or much of anything
right then. I was in a very peculiar low point for the
three-days-active benzedrine, and my mind was being fucked with to no
end by the side effects of this, and the meth was going strong and
keepin gone part of my brain, right here, the part that makes a little
trolley-bridge about two inches behind and two inches below the
sinuses in your head, adn I didn't know what that part of the brain
really did, but I kept feeling ill. Krista grabbed up some of the gear
she had left up on the counter and cautiously produced the wax-coated
ultra-thin filament, which was now much more than twice its original
diameter from the coat of wax and soap and whatever the fuck else they
put in that shit I never use, EXCEPT for Lava Soap, IN BAR FORM ONLY,
fuck that bottled shit, every time I go to the store I stab open all
the bottles of someone trying to make the impossible -liquid soap with
the proud Lava name- possible. In fact, I'm so pissed about some young
callow marketing SOB pushing the idea of "All of my faggot friends
just LUUUUUUVE hand soap, so that's what we'll make, to hell with
tradition and one of the best products ever made, let's defame the
enite reputation of our esteemed company so we can sell six bottles in
the next twenty years..." that I'd track down his wife and daughter
and take them both down, hogtie them, and use some scalding water and
as many bars of soap as I need to completely stuff every orifice to
the point where you can see the outlines of bars of soap through their
rotten bodies, shave them bald, and tightly secure them to separate
tops of tlephone/electrical poles in the middle of a desert highway...
Getting down, way down deep into business, Krista again jacked me
around to get a full, all-angles view of the obstinate hair, and
relayed odd information back to me as she noted it herself. "It's a
peculiarly tightly-bent hair, it never points up and out eventually
like all the rest, rather, it seems to have grown in a small arc so
that the tip is pointed directly back into the skin at the same angle
it came up from the follicle in. For whatever reason, the hair is too
slippery, thin or something, to hook it with any of my tools, however,
I DID manage to grab it just briefly with the lice comb, but it
slipped right off. Here's the strange part: It hooked, it caught, like
the same hair was growing in a circle in one end and out the other, a
perfect ring, but that's not possible because hair does not grow that
deep beneath the skin. My hypothesis is that this hair soemhow either
snapped like a twig or got cut somehow exactly to the length it is
now, but in the process of breaking apart or being cut, it left a
particularly sharp edge. Because the hair grew in such a way as to
have nowhere to push except back into the skin, in became a very weird
type of ingrown hair, and now it's firmly imbedded in your leg there."
"So what the fuck does that mean we do to get rid of it?" "Well,
that's why I made this tool," she said, poking at me with the
waxed-stiff tiny filament. "The entire and only use of this tool is to
pass one end of it through the bowed part of the suspected ingrown
hair, run it halfway through, pull up slowly but steadily on the ends
of the string, and this will do two things, prove that either we're
dealing with a hair that is doing what I told you I thought it was
doing or we have two hairs almost perfectly opposites of one another
coming so close together at the tips that even the blades of the razor
feel it as a smooth bump rather than anything it can cut into, and it
is too thin for the electric trimmer to catch it between its jaws at
any point in the cycle. So here goes." She carefully poked the tip of
the waxed filament around for quite a while before successful
penetration, and then grabbed the other end and started slowly pulling
up. It felt like two hairs being pulled at, but I didn't know which
end was the one with the follicle, harder to get out, and which one
was the hair end, which may have barbed inside there, in which case it
would actually tear a hole in the skin and bleed slightly after it was
ripped out. There was also the chance that the hair could not take the
pulling and would snap in two, but at least then we could shave both
ends off and BE DONE WITH THIS ORDEAL! She kept pulling, to the point
where the stubborn hair, not yet budging, caused two pinprick pains at
the place where the hair went into the skin. She slowly pulled up
harder and, strangely painfully, the right side of the hair popped
out, it was damn near a quarter of an inch long that had been stuck
there, growing right into my skin; this was accompanied by bleeding
heavier than it should have been. "I got it. That hair didn't dig
through the skin itself, it somehow poked into a PORE and consequently
was sucked along in as well as having it grow. How you can not feel
something so awful-sounding as that is beyond me." She got the
bleeding area with an alcohol swab and then jabbed mercilessly at it
with the styptic pencil. I cringed, as, doing it THAT way, it took a
good fifty seconds of rapid jabbing to rub off enough of the waxy,
cut-sealing substance to effectively block the wound. No longer
bleeding, she hurried, thankfully, as my legs were about to cramp
solid in this position, used the shears to clip the hair down to a
stubble, and dabbed a bit of hot water and a tiny bit of foam onto the
area, and made six pressing swipes with the blade and it was all over.
She ran her fingernails then the pads of her fingers all along the
shaved areas. "Thanks a whole lot, but I'm afraid you took too long. I
can't move my legs without incomprehensible pain." Her reply?

"Walk it off."

AFTERMATH:
For the first time I had been subjected to that particular strange
ritual and had more or less enjoyed myself, but not to the point of
comfort that I'll ever do it again. After a while we traded places as
had been agreed upon before and I saw the whole thing as the strangest
plot for a short independent film imaginable. We were both so
fucked-up that I never had to go into my archives or do any measuring,
and that was fine by me. Andy Radler (real name Charles Harold
Pickens) was dead, I was tired, Krista was tired, I had put a hudred
and seventy miles on the Charger that day, and (for me, at least) we
had gone to sleep fairly early, at 0314 hours. All in all, I sincerely
doubt that all that much had changed, but at least it had been a good
and memorable day and gave me an excuse to write. Sometimes I wonder
why the muse is becoming more and more difficult to net as the days go
by, and my best guess is that writing for the sake of writing is akin
to talking in order to hear oneself speak, and my next vitriolic rant
will discuss this, since of course no one is left to read this by this
point in the diatribe. But then again, who the hell is going to read
the rant, either? You people are just fucking depressing in how
hopelessly lost a cause you are and pretend to represent. Fuck off and
die, you bunch of ascetic shitbirds.