The Sick Stuff (2 page)

those perfect television families of the
fifties and sixties -- the Nelsons, the Cleavers, the Brady
Bunch.

One summer, this family decided to take a
trip to Smoky Mountain National Park. They took snapshots of the
sights, watched the Cherokee Indians do their rain dance, and found
a secluded campsite so they could commune with nature and enjoy the
great outdoors. They sang songs, roasted marshmallows over the
campfire, and swapped ghost stories. They had a wonderful time.

Then the man showed up out of nowhere,
wearing a friendly smile and a stolen park ranger's uniform.

September 12

When I was six years old, I would visit my
grandmother. She had this sweet, little canary named Penny. Penny
would fly right out of its cage in the corner of Grandmother's
sewing room and land in the palm of your hand. It would sit
perfectly still and sing you the most beautiful song.

One day, while Grandmother was out working in
her flower garden, I slipped into the sewing room and opened
Penny's door. It flew out of its cage and lit lightly in my
hand.

"Sing me a song, Penny," I said, but it
remained silent.

I took a straight pin from Grandmother's
sewing basket and shoved it into Penny's little, black eye. It
pierced the bird's tiny brain and emerged out the other side.

Penny sang me a song then, a very loud and
frantic song... but not for very long.

September 23

Bedtime story. Part Two.

The park ranger said hello, sat down beside
the fire, and drank a cup of coffee offered to him. As pleasant
conversation was exchanged, he studied the All-American family.
Father, mother, gray-haired grandmother, and two children, a boy
and a girl. He enjoyed their company for a while, as long as he
could possibly stand it. And then that damned urge crept into his
demented mind...

October 7

They sent me to reform school when I was
seventeen for cutting off my girlfriend's breasts with a pocket
knife. After all these years, I still haven't figured out what my
true motive had been. Maybe someday I'll call her up at the state
asylum and ask her if she remembers why I did such a horrible
thing.

October 14

Bedtime story. Part Three.

Father went first.

The friendly park ranger took a hunting knife
from his belt and, with an upward thrust, drove the point up under
Father's jaw. The razor-honed blade sliced effortlessly up through
his tongue, the roof of his mouth, and into his tender brain. He
fell forward into the campfire and burnt his face off while the
ranger rounded up the rest of the All-American family...

October 19

My attorney wanted me to go for an insanity
plea. I fired him and got myself another lawyer with a less
attractive track record.

I keep telling them what I want, but they
don't seem to take me seriously.

I want to fry.

I want the juice to surge through my body
until my veins pop and I begin to sizzle like a slab of raw meat on
a hot griddle.

October 31

Bedtime story. Part Four.

My, Grandma, what big eyes you have... lying in
the palm of my hand.

November 4

Boy, do I miss, Nam. Sometimes I cry myself
to sleep, I miss it so.

I volunteered to go, you know. Not because I
was patriotic, but because I heard there was a lot of weird shit
going on over there. Some of the other grunts thought I was nuts
for signing up, but they didn't understand. They all hated the Nam,
while, for me, it was pure paradise.

The first day there, the platoon sergeant
took us cherries out behind a quonset hut. There were four dead
gooks lying in a ditch, riddled with bullet holes and flies. The
sarge made us get down into that ditch and kick them in the head.
He said it was to drive the squeamishness out of our systems before
he turned us loose in the jungle. He made us kick and kick and kick
until their skulls split open and their brains covered our combat
boots.

Some of the guys puked their pussy guts up. I
would have been down in that ditch all day if they hadn't pulled me
out.

Be all that you can be...

November 8

Yesterday, some big guy named Alfonso tried
to pull a caboose on me in the jailhouse showers. I was all
lathered up and too fast for him, though. I backed him into a
corner and, finding him to be an attentive audience, did one of my
favorite impressions to entertain the sonuvabitch.

By the time the guards got there, poor
Alfonso was lying on the wet tiles of the shower stall, clutching
at himself as he bled to death. Me, I just stood there and watched
with a bloodstained smile as they searched for the missing part of
Alfonso's anatomy... one that they will never find.

You know, I do a lot of neat impressions --
Bogart, Cagney... the Donner Party.

November 11

Bedtime story. Part Five.

Hey, kids, let's pretend that it's Christmas
time!

That pine tree over there can be the
Christmas tree and we can decorate it, too... with pieces of dear,
old Mom.

We can use her fingers for tinsel and her
organs for ornaments. It'll be lots of fun, just you wait and
see.

Deck the halls with bowels of Mommy...

November 28

After coming back to the World, I spent some
time in Mexico, smuggling drugs and wetbacks across the border. The
money was good and kept me in tequila and cheap whores. Then I met
up with this guy and we started making movies.

We would lure some chick off the street and
take her back to our motel room. We would get her half drunk and
give her a snort of coke laced with Spanish Fly. By the time my
partner had his camera set up, she would be hot and ready.

Then I would come out of the bathroom, naked
except for one of those weird, leather bondage masks. I would then
proceed to make love to her. When she opened her mouth to scream in
ecstasy, I would take the linoleum knife and, reaching between our
heaving bodies...

I had that snuff film stashed somewhere in my
van with all my other scrapbooks and trophies, but I didn't have an
8mm projector to watch it with. I once considered taking it to a
Fotomat to have it transferred to DVD... but I chickened out at the
last moment.

December 1

Bedtime story. Part Six.

How about a nursery rhyme for the
children?

This little piggie went to the market.

SNAP!

This little piggie stayed home.

CRACK!

This little piggie ate roast beef.

SNAP! CRACKLE! POP!

December 13

I robbed a gas station in Tuscon once and
made the attendant eat a turd out of the men's room toilet,
promising to spare his miserable life if he would only perform that
one, simple act.

He did.

I didn't.

December 22

Bedtime story. Part Seven.

Oh, did I forget to tell you? The
All-American family had a baby with them.

I was going to let it live, honest I was. But
then I figured, hey, what kind of life is the kid going to have if
I do? He will probably be shuffled off to some sleazy orphanage and
be adopted by sadistic parents who will beat and abuse him and he
will grow up to be a sick bastard... just like me.

So I took him down to the campground trash
cans and left him there.

You know, where all the hungry bears hang out
for breakfast.

January 7

Well, it's official now. The jury handed down
their verdict and the trail is over. The death penalty. I get off
just thinking about it.

In some states it is lethal injection, in
others the gas chamber. Here in Tennessee it is Old Sparky... the
tried and true electric chair.

As for my journal, this will be the last
entry. The wire that I pried from the springs of my bunk is getting
dull and the words are barely legible now. For, you see, the
exploits I have penned have not been committed to paper... but to
human flesh. I am a living tome; all my sins and atrocities have
been carved into every inch of skin, or at least the places that I
could reach.

Perhaps, following my execution, the grisly
accounts of my life's work will be made public. Perhaps some
unscrupulous individual will bribe a morgue attendant into letting
them take photos of my body and they will end up in a sleazy
tabloid or on some off-beat website. Then all the world will be
privy to my pursuit of barbarity and perversion.

So, if you are browsing the internet during
the late hours of the night, and come upon me... please, indulge your
morbid curiosity.

Come... read my diary.

Exactly why Aunt Millie had willed him the
house on Elkins Avenue was something Chuck Stuart had been trying
to figure out since the old woman's funeral. He had finally come to
the conclusion that she had done so purely out of spite.

Chuck had never been one of his late aunt's
favorite nephews. As a teenager, his constant rebellion against
authority had always rubbed her strict religious values the wrong
way. Quite a few unsavory episodes in his wild lifestyle had
distanced him and his aunt during the years and perhaps that was
the main reason she had stuck him with that unsalable property on
the low-rent side of town.

Yes, the single-story house on the half acre
lot was completely without market value and for one distinct
reason. It was infested with spiders. Brown recluse spiders they
were, sometimes called fiddlebacks because of the pale violin shape
across their back. They were poisonous little devils; not as much
so as a black widow, but close. They had a nasty bite to them,
causing nerve and tissue damage and, if there was an allergic
reaction, death.

Aunt Millie had lived there until five years
ago, when Uncle Pete died. Then she had moved into an apartment and
rented the little white clapboard house to various low-income
families from time to time. Her property in west Nashville had
netted her two hundred bucks monthly... until the spider problem
began. It had gotten so bad, in fact, that the tenants had finally
gotten fed up and moved out, leaving their possessions behind.

Several exterminators had been hired to
fumigate the entire house, but it didn't seem to do any good. In a
month's time their number had increased tenfold. It got to the
point where his aunt was scared to even venture into the house
herself. She could see the spiders clustered on the inside of the
windows, skittering across the whitewashed siding outside and up
the rain gutters. Finally she had closed up the house permanently,
stapling sheets of clear plastic over the doors and windows until
it looked as though it was encased in cellophane, hermetically
sealed against the outer world. Millie would have had the place
torn down, but no demolition crew would go near it. Many a dozer
operator got cold feet thinking about plowing into that old house
and becoming immediately covered with the tiny brown spiders.

And now here Chuck was checking the place out
for himself. The only reason he was there was because of his own
desperation. Chuck's financial situation was pretty depressing. He
was a session musician by trade and a good one. He worked the
recording studios along Music Row, playing lead guitar and fiddle
whenever the demand arose. Lately it had not and he found himself
living uncomfortably beyond his means.

Therefore, he figured he might weasel out of
the lease on his own riverfront apartment and live there for a
while. That was if those hair-raising tales about spider
infestation panned out as being just another one of his late aunt's
vivid exaggerations. She had been quite infamous for making
mountains out of molehills.

Chuck eyed the house with apprehension as he
walked up the weedy sidewalk and climbed the porch. The front door
was blocked by a wrinkled sheet of heavy plastic, the type painters
used for drop cloths. Chuck unfolded his pocketknife and split it
down the center, watching nervously for the first sign of spiders.
So far nothing. He dug the keys from his pocket, unlocked the door
and, armed with a flashlight and a can of heavy-duty spider spray,
stepped into the cramped and stuffy living room.

The room was dark and dusty, the blinds drawn
and the second-hand furniture sitting in shadowy lumps, deserted by
the previous tenants. There was even a color television in the far
corner.
Cripes, they must have been in a hell of a big hurry to
get out of here,
he concluded. He directed his light upon the
dusty floorboards, along the drapes and the uneven plaster walls.
But still there was no visible sign of those nasty fiddlebacks.

He took the grand tour of the place, vaguely
remembering it from the times he had visited there as a child. It
was a small house built in the post-war forties. Just a living
room, a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. As he
entered each room, he expected to see fleeting movement and the
corners shrouded in tattered web. But, except for the light
powdering of dust and the rancid smell of mildew, the house seemed
perfectly normal.

Chuck breathed a sigh of relief and smirked
at his aunt's stupidity. The joke's on you, dear aunt, he thought
with a shake of his head. There aren't any spiders here. Hell, I
haven't seen a single spider since I walked into this damned
place.

On the spur of the moment he decided to rush
home, pack a few things, and spend the night there. Sort of trial
run and a further snubbing of his late relative's groundless phobia
of spiders. There would be no electricity, but he could rough it
for a couple of nights at least.

He examined the master bedroom. There he
found a sturdy wood-framed bed, complete with mattress. He sat down
and bounced a few times, testing the springs.
It'll do till I
can tote my bed over. Yeah, this might not turn out so shabby after
all.