Satan Burger (4 page)

"I’m Mort."

"Yes, but people do not call you Mort.  They call you Mortician.  That is very amusing."

"Come in then."  Mort swells with boredom in Vod’s immediate presence.

Vodka creeps into the warehouse with his fingers stretched out like batwings.  Dracula-eyes scoping the details of the warehouse.  Then he freezes in mid-step when he sees the toilet situated in the middle of the room.  He turns to Gin and raises an eyebrow, then glances back at the toilet. 

"I find your toilet most delectable," he says.  "It beckons me to sit upon it."       

Without asking permission, he sits, slowly, preparing for ultimate gratification . . . and a satisfying smile cracks the corners of his face.  "Wonderful."

Pause.

Mort says, "So you’re the lad with the bagpipes?"

"Ja," Vod says, "and I’m so excited to release my soul into their shafts, and to become one with my music, that I cannot resist an erection."

Mort’s face contorts, turning to Gin. "Wanna come with me to get the rent from John?"

"Get it yourself," Gin says.

"I’m not going to John’s by myself.  He’s . . . old."

"Then take Vodka."

Vod exclaims, "I DO NOT WISH TO LEAVE THE TOILET SEAT."

Gin, sipping at the mega-drink, scratching a soft spot on his hip, and Mort, swinging a saber, pass an Abraham Lincoln midget as they stroll behind the warehouse.

They get to a fire engine red door in the back of the warehouse.  A BIG doggie door covers half the entrance, with a sign reading, "Beware of Doggie." 

A questioning face emerges from Mort’s neck.

"That’s a big doggie door," Gin says.  "I didn’t think there were doggies that size."

"Thought I told John he’s not allowed to have pets," Mort says.  "Arr."

Mort hums the door buzzer.

Gin says, "Maybe it’s to scare away burglars and Mormons."

Mort buzzes again.  "He’s not answering."

"But he’s always here."  Gin buzzes.

Pause.

Gin rubs his neck, sipping the mega-drink.  "Look through the doggie door."

"No, thanks," says Mort, "I don’t want to see the doggie that needs a door that big."

Gin laughs.  "Afraid?"

"Arr!" Mort flips him off.  "You do it."

"I’ll do it."

"Go ahead then."

"I will."

"Then do it."

"I will."

Gin bends down, scratching a breast.

"Then do it."

"Shut up, I’m doing it."  Gin throws open the doggie door and looks inside.

But first:

Spin-feelings rush into Gin, giving form to a large orange structure in Gin’s head which is a living being quite like the cross between a tapeworm and an apartment building.  This creature is the offspring of Gin’s hangover, and Gin’s head is the incubator, pulsating warmth.  It takes twenty-four hours before it will leave into the outside world, and Gin will have to bear its pain until then.  He gets this infant in his head many times a week from drinking too much hard alcohol – which, of course, is gin.

And with the infant/creature handing him a blood-rushing of the head, Gin doesn’t realize the doggie on the inside of the doggie door.  The doggie being of a certain breed that no one has ever seen before.  It is the
John
breed.  Well, it is actually just John himself, naked and on all fours, growling with foam.  A fat, bald, middle-aged man that thinks he is an attack doggie.

Then, just as an attack doggie would, John flies toward the intruder, splashing the mega-drink between them.  And Gin screams out, flap-dashing down the street with the human doggie chasing him, barking.

And Mort bends down to pick up the rent money settled on the ground just within the door, inside of an envelope with two flowers and a pencil and four paper clips and some breakfast, and the bills have little smiles drawn onto the president faces in blue ink.

The naked doggie springs at Gin’s legs, thumping him to the ground, handing him a large number of claw-scratchings.

           The Abraham Lincoln midget comes to save the young man from further injuries, rapping John-doggie on the scalp with a rolled-up newspaper, which angers the wannabe doggie, turning to Lincoln midget and biting his pant leg, thrashing it about.

Gin darts away.

Mort, from a distance, gives a cluttered face – a confused spectator watching John chase Lincoln down the street, barking and biting at his ankles. 

Back to me:

I find myself reading a Mutilation Man comic book at a corner store/liquor store, and I’m not positive how I got here.  Mutilation Man swirls off the page and hides under the magazine rack, which looks more like a transformer in my eyes. 

Christian and Nan are searching the shelves for nice cheap liquor.

"What you want?" Christian asks, swarming his arm around Nan’s stomach.

"I don’t know.  They’re all too expensive."

"Just pick one.  You can afford it."

"Well, you’re hasty all of a sudden."

"Bite me."

She bites him on the chubby part of his shoulder and he screams a laugh.  Then she grabs a bottle of Fork’s Gum for him.

"Whiskey?" amazed at her choice.  She usually drinks butter almond rum.

Christian takes it to the cashier, a brown-haired, blond mustache-bearing man, who has never slept with a woman under the age of forty, who is now reading a newspaper. 

Christian puts the bottle and his ID onto the counter.

The cashier looks up from his paper.  "Eight even," he says.

Nan throws some crumpled bills.  The cashier glances at the cash and then tosses them back.  "Sorry, I can’t accept this."  He goes back to his paper.

"Why not?"

"I don’t accept American money."

Christian and Nan stare at him for a few minutes.

"How can you not accept American money in an American store?" Christian asks.

"For your information, this store isn’t in America.  It’s in New Zealand."

"No, it’s not.  It’s in America."

The cashier slams the newspaper.  "Didn’t you read the sign?"

"What sign?"

The cashier jumps over the counter to the glass of the door and picks up a small piece of notebook paper with four words written in magic marker. 

It reads:

WELCOME TO NEW ZEALAND

The he tapes it back to the glass.

"Real funny," Christian groans.

"I’m not joking.  The dirt underneath this store is owned by New Zealand."

"Sure it is."

"Hawaii’s not attached to the U.S., but it’s still considered part of the country."

"Yeah, but Hawaii’s surrounded by water, not another country."

"Hey, Mr. Man, I own this store and it’s going to be in whichever country I want it to be in!  Actually, I don’t want it to be in New Zealand anymore."  He crosses out New Zealand and writes in another country.

Now it reads:

WELCOME TO VENEZUELA

The cashier is proud of himself.  "There.  Now we’re in Venezuela and you can’t buy that whiskey unless you have Venezuelan money."

Nan comes in.  Her expression says
I’m sick of this
.

           She punches the cashier in the face.  He screams straight to the ground.

"My tongue is broken," the Cashier cries.

Nan takes the money and the whiskey, walking toward the door.  "What are you going to do, call the Venezuelan police?"

The cashier bleeds.

As we leave the store, we discover that the sun is ready to go in for the night, heading back home to his wife and kiddies, who are all sit-waiting for him to come down to them with crab sticks and dinner rolls perched on their flowery kitchen counter.

On his way over the horizon, the sun accidentally brushes against a mountain range and catches the landscape on fire.

And as the sunset becomes a forest of flames and red-orange swirls with smoky demons crawling their way to the cloud people, and as the abstracted vegetation and forest creatures fall over in disgust, all that Mr. Sun says about his action is this:

"Sorry about catching you on fire.  I’ll try to be more careful tomorrow."

Scene 4

History Comes Alive

The warehouse spits a wad of throat-snot onto a passerby and then goes about its daily routine of sulking in its foundation.  When the passerby insists the warehouse explain itself, the warehouse waves him away with a little wooden finger and calls him a log of boob poop.

The warehouse doesn’t realize, however, that there is a group of Gorguals nearby.  Gorguals are an alien race that excrete food-waste from their breasts, which work like buttocks.  And there’s a hole – the breast hole – between both mounds, which lean forward over a toilet for defecation.  In other words, their boobs poop.  The Gorguals don’t take offense to the warehouse’s
boob poop
comment since they do not speak English or the language that warehouses speak; and even if they did speak English or Warehouse they would not have taken offense because crapping (an informal term) is accepted socially within their culture.  Translated from Gordual tongue, the term
crapping
is referred to as
stool liberation
.  

The sun is gone, eating dinner with his family, and the warehouse is taken by old Earth-toys, all punks and skinheads mauling each other and skreaking, which makes the warehouse very bitter and inclined to spit at passing ones on its carpet walkway.

Inside of the warehouse’s guts, a concert is in session.  A legion of color shuffles soundly, merrily around and round-a-go.  I am behind the stage, muzzy from the round-a-go crowd movements and all the shifty colors, ticking sick.

My band is playing already, but I am not yet onstage, liquor-inhaling.

Christian is running the performance, rape-screeching and scratching sheet metal with Mortician, who plays his distorted bass with a knife and a cellular phone.  We are an electronic noise band, which is a very popular Japanese food creation.  Actually, I didn’t mean to say electronic noise is
a very popular Japanese food creation
, though it is a genre of music invented by the Japanese music underground.

This is what I meant to say: the name of our band is
A Very Popular Japanese Food Creation.

Very few people in the room enjoy our style of music, even though they mosh and punch each other as if dancing to it.  They’re all waiting for the headlining brutal oi!/punk skinhead band to play, and that will be the start of a large kicking/punching/fork-through-the-skull festival I assure you.

Within the center of the room, there are two things: one is Vod, who is sitting on the toilet playing his bagpipes to the electronic noise, and the other thing is a history book that smells of rotten human.

History books and rotten humans are two things that you’ll always find in a graveyard.  Long ago, you could only find rotten humans there and never any history books, and this made the cemetery a very boring place to visit.  My mother told me, long before I came to hate her, that the whole point of going to the cemetery was to visit gravestones and a plot of dirt, where you were to put flowers if you had the money for them.

Now the whole point of going to the cemetery is to read history books.  Let me explain:

It started when all the governments of the world decided that it would be a very neat idea for everyone and everyone to write journals of their lives, including every day, every moment, every thought, every person, every creation, and every thing important to each individual from day to day to day to death, so that everyone will have their memories and their life story written down, to live eternally after department.  But only two copies were to be made.  One is sewn into the stomach of the deceased and the other is for the public to read.

A Gravestone is not just a stone with a name and a date to another date anymore.  It now has a little waterproof/airproof drawer inside that contains the autobiography of the person buried beneath.  And ever since I was a child, I’ve been going to the cemetery and reading the lives of the dead.  And every time I read about someone, that someone becomes alive again.

Not too many people care to read history books anymore.  Nobody even cares to write them; even I have given them up due to my acid ocean eyes.  I still go to the cemetery and look at the pictures and titles, but it’s disappointing to know that I can’t read them entirely.

They don’t let you steal the history books.  It’s very important that you don’t, for history’s sake.  But they don’t have any security guards to stop you, only the gatekeeper, and he doesn’t really care.  Still, I’ve never heard of anyone stealing a history book besides myself.

I stole
The Story of Richard Stein
.

It was such a great history that I had to keep it.  But I still had respect for the readers of the books of the dead, especially the readers of Richard Stein, so I didn’t take the book on display.  I thief-slithered onto his grave one night and dug that old corpse up.  I stab-cut into his gut with some pizza shears – which was quite the ass painting – and filched the book resting inside.  It’s just as good, but it has a rotten Richard Stein smell on it.  It’s the only book that I try to read other than comics.  But I already know the majority of it by heart.

His words       are called
wisdom
by the critics on the back cover. 

Richard Stein has taught me much about the world we live in.  His book is my bible.  Well, something had to be.  The real bible is very boring, being on the level of a bad coffee table magazine.  Not that I hate everything the bible says. Personally, I agree with most of the biblical messages, I guess, but I just think the writers weren’t any good.  Matthew and Mark were okay, but Luke and some others told as drome a story as a ten-hundred-page book about dentistry.  (Just in case you didn’t know,
drome
means boring and
droll
means interesting, so you don’t get confused.)

The Richard Stein Bible is more like a guide to being alive than it is the story of his life.  It doesn’t seem like
his
story at all, actually, because he wrote it in the third person, which is one reason why I decided to read his book instead of all the other histories.  It is next to impossible to read every history book in the cemetery, not to mention it’s not worth reading them all since many people live very drome lifestyles.  So I had to judge the whole book on reading the first paragraph, hoping it would be an interesting attention-grabber.

Richard Stein’s first paragraph was:

"The main thing that keeps the gun away from your head is thirteen hundred bottles of bourbon, eight hundred bottles of vodka, three hundred bottles of gin, two thousand bottles of rum, six cups of everclear, and four hundred twenty-two bottles of southern comfort during the course of a lifetime; but any more than that and you’ll be considered an alcoholic.  Richard Stein was considered an alcoholic."

Nan is in the round-a-go crowd with a chunky blue-haired woman named Liz, who says she has sex with small mammals.  They are at a table, sitting on milk crates, sitting with two Harvey Wallbangers and two walrus-shaped skinhead guys who are trying to take both girls home with them, thinking their red suspenders are attractive enough to surpass walrus-shaped features.

"Your friends are pretty Mr. T, Nan," Liz says, letting one of the skinheads’ hands reach around her dimpled thigh.  "But I was expecting another punk band."

Nan punches the zit-bearded skinhead, just for looking at her.  "Yeah, they suck, but they’d rather have everyone hate them.  I think that’s the point of being in a noise band."

Zit Beard doesn’t leave, finding Nan’s violent reactions arousing.  He snuggles her shoulder and she punches him in his tits.  A smile cats up on his BIG red face, and he does it again, whisper-caressing her stomach this time – not because he wants to turn her on, but because he wants her to punch him again, hopefully harder.  She elbows him in the neck.  Very stimulating.

"Have you seen Gin lately, Liz?" Nan asks, elbowing Zit Beard once more for a diversion, accepting the fact that administering pain to someone other than herself is a rather enjoyable performance. 

But Liz finds the act of allowing a blubber-filled shirtless skinhead rub his hand all over the insides of her clothes a more enjoyable performance.  She forgets to reply to Nan’s question among all the fat-sweaty sensuality.  Instead, she asks another question: "When do you want me to return that Hertzan Chimera book?  I haven’t finished it, but I don’t think I’ll be able to."

"What about Gin?" Nan asks.

"What?"

"Gin.  Have you seen him?"

"I think he went on a beer run with Lenny and the guy from the first band."

"Thanks."  Nan gets up, kicking Zit Beard on the way, and scuffling into a round-a-go crowd.

I appear on stage – swirl-swirl goes the crowd and the color-blooming makes my eyes sizzle – with my cello and my T-shirt that reads
Battlestar Galactica 4 Life
.  I play a short slimy cello solo and then the song curdles into a blur of discord before it ends.

The crowd does not seem to notice we are here.

Vodka leaps from the toilet, stampers onto the stage, into our faces.  "I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO MY BAGPIPE SOLO AFTER THE CELLO INTRO," he screams, though his scream is non-exclamatory because of his anti-emotional attitude.  He shoves Christian, thrashes the sheet metal, and rammer-runs through the warehouse, but his movements still seem robot-like.

The crowd doesn’t seem to notice Vodka’s outrage.

"This is our last song," Christian says to the crowd.  "It’s called
The Greatest American Hero Theme Song
."

We play some gak-shrilling noises and squeal, but it sounds nothing like the original theme song.  Before the music ends, we are kicked off of our own stage by a band of five skinheads.  The singer (Zit Beard) takes the mic from Christian, pushing him into the crowd who beat him up cruel.  Zit Beard spits on the crowd and everyone cheers.

In other words: ZIT BEARD = PUNK.

"We’re the Oi!s," says Zit Beard.  "Our first song is about smashing capitalism and breaking fascism and stomping religion and destroying all the governments of the world.  It’s called PUNK ROCK!"

This is what he sings:

"PUNK ROCK!  PUNK ROCK!  OI!  OI!  OI!"

The punk kids are into songs like this.  They cheer and jump and punch each other until the song ends half a minute later. 

"Thanks," he says.  "Our next song is called ANARCHY!"

Nan gets herself outside to find Gin, but there is no Gin.  She meets someone named Lenny instead, scurries over to him, stepping over a flattened little Abraham Lincoln hat.

She calls, "Lenny!"

He mopes around, all drunk and finished, was puking in the back lot, wiping some yellow off his chin.  Lenny is a thin little guy, antsy stickman, so it didn’t take much beer to make him vomity drunk.  He wears old lady glasses and a shirt that says,
Kiss me, I’m Yugoslavian
. 

"Where’s Gin?" she asks him.  "Liz said he went with you."

"Oh yeah," his voice cracks in a drunken sort of way, "Gin told me to tell you he’ll be at Stag’s place.  I would’ve gone with them, but they wanted to stop off at Satan Burger, and . . . I’m Vegan Hardcore you know."

Her face crimps up all red, squeezing her fists.  "That cunt is dead.  I told him not to go anywhere without telling me."

Lenny shakes his head at Nan for acting the tough guy and walks away.  "Well, I should get going then."

"Lenny," she stops him with her awkward voice, "You have a truck, don’t you?"

He turns back around, "Look, Nan, it’s not that I don’t want to take you . . ."

She grabs him by the wrist and drag-pulls him toward his truck.  "Come on.  We still might be able to catch him at Satan Burger if we hurry."

Nan has many-many problems besides her tough-guy-dominating-Gin routine.  She’s also manic-depressive, she’s missing half of her right lung, she’s an insomniac, and she’s always having problems with her sexual identity (An abusive father and three older brothers raised her as a boy).  This kind of upbringing could have turned her into a lesbian, but since she is disgusted enough just
being
a woman, there’s not even the slightest chance that she would get the desire to have
sex
with one.

Richard Stein said that the only thing children need to do to keep the guns away from their heads is to have pets of their very own.  A dog or a cat or a gerbil or even a goldfish would suffice, keeping their fragile little minds on the pets instead of on the nasty juices that society likes to spit at them.  Pets may be just small creatures to adults, but they’re gifts of good mental health to the kids.  Some children are allergic to animals, though, and tend to avoid owning them; and not owning an animal as a child ruins the perfect cure for keeping the gun away from the head once adulthood arrives.  This sometimes results in what people call
a bad childhood
, and what
a bad childhood
does is make a person bitter. 

Bitter
is what we call Nan.

The only pet Nan ever had was a small black duck. She named it Chico and one time her father decided it was food and ate it.  He was drunk and thought it would be a funny way to show off to his hairy shirtless friends. 

The worst of Nan’s problems had nothing to do with visualizing poor Chico digesting inside of her spiteful father’s beerbelly.  Actually, the worst of her problems had nothing to do with her father at all.

You see, Nan loves Jesus Christ very-very much.  She’s deeply in love with him. 
Obsessively
in love with him.  And I don’t mean in a good-mannered sense of the word
love
.  I mean she’s sex-erotically in love with him.  She talks about how she wants to strip him to his crown of thorns, whip him until he bleeds salty red and the blood dribbles down his body until her nipples get hard and her sauce starts bubbling.  Then she envisions screwing him violent-sinful, while he is nailed to the cross, dying-dying.  And she fantasizes about fucking him until he’s dead on the cross, and then fucking him until he resurrects.