Johnny Clusterfuck’s Last Stand

Johnny Clusterfuck was a 7 foot tall, 350 pound human-pitbull hybrid with a glass left eye and a scrotal sac filled with battery acid.

Betty thought she could handle the big lug, but she thought wrong, epically wrong. One cross word and the circuit was closed and it was on: He all frothy and deadly, she in a shimmery iceblue evening gown that hugged her every curve in the exact same way everyone in the bar wished they could.

It would have been over much more quickly if he’d just gone for her directly, but the hydraulically assisted freak had to try and show off, mowing down the other patrons with an utter lack of grace that was simply appalling to her.

She waited for him to cool down. Waited. Waited. Finally, set up a ten count and when the tenth victim, a kindly woman who gave generously of herself to others, especially when she was drunk, was torn in half with a vicious roundhouse kick, Betty took a lovely step forward.

Her left arm extended in a movement so utterly perfect that you half expected the blue bird of happiness to land on her ring finger and sing a couple bars from Ode to Joy. A red spot bloomed on the inside of her wrist, extended to a line, opened to a wound. From it, a thin stream of blood flowed to the floor, collecting to a small, perfectly circular pool. Her arm continued it’s arc, a symphony of grace and divine purpose, bringing the stigmata to her mouth where she sealed it with a kiss.

Such was the glory of her attack that the room had gone silent and still in its wake. Johnny Clusterfuck stood there, transfixed, tears streaming down his right cheek from the sheer beauty of it all, not watching the pool of blood as it started flowing across the floor, straight at him like a water snake through the bayou.

He continued to not notice that the blood had reached him, continuing up his leg, leaving a faint red trail in it’s wake. She met his eyes at last, smiled warmly, and asked, “What is it about boys like you that girls like me find so attractive?”

Johnny Clusterfuck’s left eye twitched a stirring rendition of “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” in morse code.

“Wrong answer.”

The galoot shook his head like a dog shaking off water, coming back to the rancid stew of negative reinforcement and poorly repressed trauma that passed for his senses. For the first time, he felt the line of blood that had made it’s way up his rippled torso and wrapped itself around the knot of muscle between his head and shoulders that passed for his neck. With a great force of effort, he raised both his hands up to try and do something about it but there was a slippery denseness to it that kept him from getting a grip on it, unable to pry it away from his skin. His face was a mask of confusion.

She winked at him. No morse code. Just a wink.

The blood tightened it’s grip. His eyes bugged out, fingers clawing great furrows in his skin but not affecting the blood at all. The bar was so quiet, you could hear the bones of his neck pop.

Johnny Clusterfuck dropped, first to his knees, then fell to the side, never taking his eyes from hers. She returned his stare with a look that bordered on the maternal as he shat himself and shed the coil.

From the reactions of the people in the bar, you would’ve thought she’d gone and won the Superbowl.

What’s My Poison?

“Dwarves.”

“Excuse me?”

“Dwarves. Fucking Dwarves. They’re always there. Watching.”

It was only when I turned my head and looked at the guy that I figured out he wasn’t talking to me, just mumbling with his old boozer mumble into an old fashioned half filled with a dark amber liquid. Scotch, maybe.

I hadn’t been in this particular bar for a few years and never at this hour. Back in the day, it was mostly noted for the giant neon martini glass and blinking sign reading “Open 6 AM” over the door. The kind of place that flared for a bit with the recent post-grads who would’ve been way too chickenshit to walk into a real dive.

I was driving by on the way to my crappy job so that I could pay the rent on my crappy apartment so that I didn’t drop out of my crappy life. That was before the first cup of coffee, ask me later and the picture would’ve brightened considerably.

As it was, as I drove past the bar, just like I did every morning, this thought crawled across my brain, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Stopped at a red light, I looked at myself in the rearview, sharing the mirror with the bar’s sign. Nothing, that’s what could happen. It would be a single day. The safest rebellion ever.

By the time I’d thought twice about it, I was sitting in a parked car and making some lame-ass excuse to my boss’s voicemail, hoping that the connection sounded like it was coming over a landline.

And then I was in the bar.

At 7 in the morning.

It was surprisingly full. Who knew there were so many old drunks out this time of day? You never saw them walking around, they were just...here.

The bartender, a tall, thin man, slid in front of me and waited without speaking. With his neat hair and by-the-books getup of white shirt, black trousers, and apron, he reminded me of someone, but I couldn't tell you who.

What do you order this time of day? Mimosas and Bloodys were out of the picture. This wasn’t the sort of place for that kind of drink. It would be like ordering a Fuzzy Navel at the Zam Zam back when Bruno owned it.

Might as well go for it, “Jack Daniels, please.”

Curt nod and he was off and back with my Jack before I knew it. Served it neat without asking.

Went burning straight down my throat and into my otherwise empty stomach.

There. Now we’re all caught up.

The guy next to me continues mumbling, this time too quiet to make out anything. I prick up my ears a bit and that’s when the other voices seep in on the edges, all mumbling about the same.

I turn and look, really look. It was like looking into an infinity mirror of drunks. All the way down the bar are little old men and women, all leaning over old fashioned glasses half filled with fluids of various darkness.

I dropped my jaw and stared, but the drunks just kept on doing their thing, each in their own world. After a while, they would sit back on their stools and take a hit from a shot glass each of them had at their elbow. At no point did I see anyone drink from the larger glass. Stranger still, from time to time the bartender would glide through and collect the larger glasses, generally when their contents had taken on a really dark amber hue. He would then take the glass to a large glass bulb that fed into a series of other bulbs and reservoirs, all connected with patina’d copper tubing. The bar, a glorious dark oak dinosaur, was built around this labyrinth, with a brass step ladder set into the wood next to the tank. The bartender climbed these steps and poured the glass’s contents into the tank through a gasket at the top.

Further down, at around chest height, were a series of brass spigots set into the side of the bar. Above the spigots were little handwritten signs, too far away for me to read. The bartender would climb down and half fill a fresh glass from one of the spigots, this time with clear liquid. He would then place the clear liquid in front of them and pour them another shot for the smaller glass.

“Read any William Burroughs?”

This time, the question was directed at me. It was the bartender. I hadn’t noticed him approach.

“Sorry?”

“I was asking if you’ve ever read any William S. Burroughs, you know...”

I quickly recovered, lest he think I wasn’t cool, “Sure. A little, anyway. Why?”

He motioned down the bar with a nod, “Makes it easier to explain.” He paused, studying my face, looked down at my empty glass, looked up at me.

“Jack, please.”

He had the bottle ready. Much easier going down this time.

“Anyway, Burroughs had this theory that the real reason people get drunk is the contrast. The contrast between life and death. That as living beings, we are taking a little bit of death inside ourselves...”

“Death?”

“You know, through the fermentation process.”

“Right.” I had no idea what he was talking about. “I don’t remember this from Naked Lunch.”

“That’s because it’s from The Western Lands. Anyway, the owner of this bar, Mr. Flint, he ran with the Beats. Knew all of those guys. One night, he’s up on a speed binge with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and these other guys and they’re having this all time philosophical bull session, one for the ages from what you hear.”

He paused to see if I was following. He needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t even blinking.

“So these guys are running the theory around the room, seeing where it could go and they start talking about other contrasts. If you could get life and death, what about rich and poor, happy and miserable, old and young. Well, one of the other guys is this son of a famous winemaker from Italy, a couple others are chemists, I think one of them went on to win the Noble prize for it, a Tibetan mystic, and they are having a ball, thinking it’s all just BS. Except for Flint, who’s sitting there taking notes like it was going to be on the final. The next day, he starts working on this system. Trial and error, it took him another twenty years until he finished the device behind me.”

“What, exactly, does it do?”

“It distills things.” He let the sentence stretch out a bit. He was enjoying this. “Things like emotions and memories.”

“Say what?”

“Just like I said. Flint has these connections around the city, through the homeless outreach programs mostly, he calls them his farm team...has them arranged by their personal demons.”

“Demons? Real demons?”

“Real enough, but I’m talking about the kind that roam in the old bone cave.” He tapped the side of his head once he saw that he’d lost me again, “Mental problems, whatever made them...them.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not, but it was fun playing along, “What’s the deal with this group?”

“Pretty rare, actually. Delusional, borderline dangerous. Paranoid.”

“And what comes out of this?”

“Just what you think. Pretty select clientèle for this sort of draught, though. I’ve heard there are a couple of groups in LA that get together and drink this stuff. People in the entertainment industry, lawyers and executives I think. They say it helps them keep their edge.”

I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face. He reacted with a ghost of a smile.

“Want a taste? As they say, the first one’s free.”

I looked down the bar again, trying in vain to imagine what the stuff must be like, assuming of course that this wasn’t simply a bartender bored off his ass trying to pass the time with the only customer capable of forming complex sentences.

There was that thought again, “What’s the worst that could happen.”, except that this time, the downside wasn’t so easily dismissed.

What the fuck. In for a penny...

“Hit me.”

He turned smoothly, strode down the bar, and returned with a small crystal vial filled with a dark liquid and placed it in front of me. I looked down at it and back at him.

“This came from them?”

“In a sense, there are a lot more steps involved than just that. What you have there is over 18 months old.”

There was a scent coming off the liquor, musty with a tinge of blood and tears.

“Best to down it all at once.” he advised.

Sounded like good advice. I raised the glass to my lips, the smell increasing and noticed the look in the bartender’s eyes had changed, narrowing from bland to something predatory.

Couldn’t say if it was that look or something from the scent of the draught, but it brought me up short.

What was with that look? Strike that. Why was he telling me all this at all? Thinking about it, this seemed like the very thing you would want to keep quiet. It didn’t make sense.

What if I told other people? Sure, the Chronicle wouldn’t buy it, but this was right in the Bay Guardian's wheelhouse and I’m pretty sure this was why Al Gore invented the Internet. Must be awful sure I wouldn’t tell anyone.

I set the glass back down on the bar.

A moment, him looking at me, taking my measure, me trying not to turn tail and run, trying harder to suppress this wild desire to pick the glass up again.

With a shrug, he picked up the glass and set it aside, glided back down and emptied a couple more glasses into the tank. Refilled the shot glasses. A couple minutes later he was back in front of me with another crystal shot glass, this time filled with a much lighter liquid.

It sat there on the bar and I just stood there staring at it. Major portions of my brain were telling me that the thing to do was turn on my heel and get the Hell out of there. I’d taken an odd turn here somewhere and if turning around and retracing my steps was the way to get out, that’s what I would do.

But there were these other parts of me, the parts that got me in here in the first place, that said otherwise. I’d spent most of the my life staying out of situations like this. All the way through high school and college, I’d kept everything safe and cool, but since moving to San Francisco two years ago and getting to know people who not only lived lives more on the edge, but didn’t seem to be any of the worse for it, well, let’s just say I’ve been rethinking this part of my life. Turning 30 a couple of months ago didn’t help.

If not now, I rationalized, when? When I was married? Or when I had kids? My dad went that way a little, although it was generally more embarrassing than really dangerous. It wasn’t like he had an affair or did anything really stupid. Still, the idea of your father having an identity crisis at the age of 45 was little bracing. As a kid, you kind of hope that all of that gets resolved by then.

The glass was half way to my face before I was conscious of picking it up. The scent hit me at that point—a powerful melange of summer grass, popsicles, Elmer’s glue, and that was only the beginning. It was incredible. I closed my eyes to savor the shifting aromas.

When I’d opened them again, they’d fallen on the contents of the glass. There were subtle blooms of color going on in there, blue, green, it was hard to tell, but it must be some trick of the light, right?

The bartender was watching all this go on, eyes laughing through his specs. It was the awareness of this that got me to pull my eyes from whatever was in the glass, “What is this? It smells...” Every time I tried for a word to describe it, the word seemed inadequate.

The smile had spread from his eyes to his lipless mouth, “Remarkable, isn’t it? I understand it’s Mr. Flint’s favorite elixir.”

“Elixir?”

“It’s what he calls them, well, most of the time...in any case, it’s how they are known.”

“What is it?”

“Childhood.”

The what now? I regarded the glass again, starting to doubt that it was just a trick of the light. Pulled my eyes off the liquid by casting them down the bar like a desperate dice roll with all or nothing riding on the throw. Down the row of drunks.

Wait a minute. If this is childhood, then how did they...

He saw it coming a mile off, “Mr. Flint is very supportive of early childhood education. He supports a lovely preschool in the Western Addition.”

“Yeah?”

“The school is known for rather...esoteric craft projects.”

“You can’t be saying what I think you’re saying.”

“And what is that?”

The little amused smile was starting to piss me off, which was good because it was taking my mind off the scent of the glass still in my hand, “I’m trying to picture a line of little kids doing what these guys are doing,” I gestured down the bar with the glass, overly aware that I hadn’t spilled a drop. “But from there I can’t decide if the next thing I see is a group of freaked out parents storming this bar or the police carting your Mr. Flint off to jail.”

“Oh, I can assure you that the process is different from that and completely above reproach. And the city’s leaders are well aware of Mr. Flint’s elixirs. Some of them, in fact, are regulars.”

“Customers?”

“And suppliers in a couple of cases.”

Huh? I tried to picture the Mayor or the Board of Supervisors lined up at the bar, making speeches into glasses of clear liquid. It wasn’t as hard to do as it should have been. I needed to say something else or I was going to empty the glass, and I still wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted to do, “Then how is it made?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know for sure, I just pour them.”

I held the line. The guy liked to tell a story. And he’d already invested quite a bit of time in me.

“From what I understand, it involves pillows crafted with a very specific Tibetan pattern. The children’s dreams work their way through the threads in the pattern into a special medium in the center of the pillow.”

“You have got to be shitting me.”

“Proofs in your hand, buddy. You up for it or not?”

Cajoling? He was clearly running out of ideas. Next, he’ll tell me that all the cool kids were doing it. Wait, no. He’s been saying that all along. I regarded the elixir in the glass, the way the light played in it, the smell of it. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I took the glass to my lips, just a sip to start, or so I thought until the first drop hits my tongue and then the shot was drained.

It started out sweet and light, like sugared rosewater, moved up to brighter flavors and then got weird from there. It tasted like it smelled and I just can’t describe it any better than that. But I’ll never forget the taste.

My arm somehow managed to steer the now empty glass back down to the bar.

It wasn’t like being drunk. Or stoned, for that matter, not that I have a lot of experience with the latter, but this was like nothing I’d ever experienced before and trust me, I would have remembered.

I was still me, in that I knew my name and there were no gaps in my memory. I could recite my address, phone number, birthday, all of that. But the baggage of it all, the weight and import, were somehow lifted from mix. Memories were just things that happened. I felt light as a feather. No wonder this was Flint’s favorite elixir.

All this passed without any of my bar mates taking the slightest interest. Well, the bartender did say this was a pretty serious group.

For his part, the bartender remained where he was, same little smile on his face, although it didn’t bother me nearly as much as it did before. It hit me that he reminded me of the bartender in The Shining, that amiable enabler of Jack’s descent. I was able to consider this without all the meaning and portents behind it. He was just a guy who looked like a guy in a movie.

I looked around the bar again, faded posters on the walls, torn upholstery in the vacant booths, old people at the bar. The bar itself was still cool, but that only took a minute and I was starting to get bored. Well, not bored, more like really, really restless.

I wanted to go outside. I was having trouble standing still for long.

The bartender seemed to understand this, didn’t even charge me for the two Jack Daniels I’d downed. The elixir, of course, was free.

I spilled out of the bar into the most beautiful morning I’d ever seen. I’d tried ecstasy a time or two and it wasn’t like that, either. I didn’t really like it, too artificial for me to really enjoy. At the time I compared it to riding a runaway train in a car filled with pillows; comfortable but not comforting, if that makes any sense. Anyway, this was different, it was just...great.

I walked past my car and continued towards the still rising sun, if for no other reason than the fact that the warmth felt great on my skin. I figured that I’d already gotten the day off work, might as well make the best of it.

Afterword

It’s been a month since I wrote the above. It took everything I had to keep from dropping into the bar the next day and asking for more. About the only thing that worked was the absolute certainly that if I went back in, parts of me would never leave. I try to remember how it felt after that draught of childhood, but it gets harder every day. Probably for the best.

Angel in My Pocket

Down below, far below, desires stirred through concrete canyons, whipping into a heady froth when the buildings grew close and crowds gathered, rising steadily over the bars and brothels, higher than it would have seemed possible. Up to the top of the tallest of the towers. And with those desires, came snatches of conversation.

First, a young women’s voice, trying to cover some frustration, “It’s like, once it rains, everyone forgets how to drive.”

The other voice, another woman, older, clearly relishing the comfort of wisdom for youth, “It gets greasy...y’know? Tired...and people get sleepy. We are a nation of sleep deprived people...”

She went on, piling needless detail upon shallow observation. Just a typical conversation, but to him it was like a young wine, bursting with sunshine and fruit. As intoxicating as desires that came with it.

In the penthouse suite of a building described as a gleaming knife plunged into the heart of downtown San Francisco, He stood above it all, continuing the conversation in an otherwise empty room, “There are other deprivations, my dears, things you would never imagine.” He was staring down to the rain smeared neon far under foot, something like love working the edges of his good eye, “I think you’ve all suspected, in some sense, at least that there is something missing from your life. From all your lives. Many people have enriched themselves pretending to fill that need, but the best any of them could hope to muster is but the faintest echo.”

He paused a second, waiting for additional bits of conversation to come his way, but the winds must have shifted as none would come. He continued nonetheless, “You could say that it’s the one thing that unifies us all. Loss. We all arise from the fall.” This last was spoken in a near whisper, only for himself.

He was a tall wrinkled man in a wrinkled white suit. Hard to really say where the man stopped and the suit began. He could be anywhere from 30 to 300. A white patch covered his left eye, just a shade off the pallor of his skin.

Duncan Flint’s left hand came up and rubbed his right eye, the normal one, a bout of sudden dryness disturbing his calm. His hand continued along the top of his oddly wrinkled head, pulling the wrinkles taught which also had the effect of shifting his features up his face. There was something hollow in the way it moved. Something clearly wrong.

Despite his best efforts, the pain lingered. He had clearly seen too much tonight. He knew he should be using lube, just like any old whore, but his vanity prevented him. Painkillers were out of the question as anything he could hope to score wouldn’t stand a chance against his metabolism and the acquired resistance that comes from decades of frequent and varied abuse. He needed something to take his mind off it.

He produced a white moleskine from his coat pocket and made a quick review of his schedule, nodded, and put the notebook back in his pocket.

Pausing for just a beat in the hopes of another windbourne diversion, He closed the window, turned, and walked away from the floor to ceiling smartglass sheets that served as the south wall, across the wooden floor of the austere suite to a heavily padded door set in the opposite wall. There were many other doors in the room, but only one door looked like this one.

To the left side of the door was a pedestal ashtray, the kind you used to see in high end hotel lobbies back in the day. Flint clamshelled open the copper dome on top of the ashtray, under it was a white porcelain dish with a central depression filled with a thick, greenish liquid. Tiny shapes looking like pale newborn rats reclined along the liquid’s edge. Closer study revealed small black bat wings and curious hairless monkey faces with bright blue eyes filled with wonder and simple wisdom. Flint reached down and picked one up, heedless of it’s tiny plea of mercy.

They were called Quizzlings and the majority of those who knew of their existence thought their presence long passed from this world. None of this mattered to Flint. The only thing that did was that Quizzlings were the smallest, gentlest creatures known to have a soul.

He gingerly placed the creature in a small chamber set into the front face of the lock, and shut the tiny door, securing it with a latch, produced key carved from some ancient ebony bone, and inserted it into the hole set below the chamber. With a quarter turn to the left, a loud clatching sound came from the lock, almost muffling the Quizzling’s death cry.

The door opened on silent hinges, revealing an ancient darkness.

Flint took a small control unit from a shelf next to the door and entered the room. The door closed silently behind him. The darkness was maddening and complete but Flint didn’t seem to notice, speaking casually as he walked in a wide circle, an even foot away from the walls, “Good morning. I trust you’ve slept well?”

A rasping, muffled sob arose from all around him.

A smile slid across his face, teeth bared and very, very sharp, voice sickly sweet, “Oh, right. I’m sorry, I really had planned to let you rest longer, but you just can’t believe the demand we’re facing. You’ve really created quite the sensation.”

Notes bloomed within the sobbing, beautiful and fragile. A plea.

“Of course not. You really should know better than that.”

Frantic now, trills that called to mind the flight of the buck from the hunter, but still, a plea for mercy.

“Well, enough chat. Time to get to work.” He thumbed a center button on the control.

The room bloomed with light. The room was smaller than you would have thought, a windowless box 15 feet on a side. The walls were covered with thick, black foam coating, a large plasma display was set into the floor, pointing straight up. It was covered with a clear plastic sheet strong enough to stand on. On top of the sheet was a crystal bowl.

This all served to highlight the room’s occupant. It looked like a plump, pink toddler of unclear gender, crowned with a shining mop of blond hair, clad in a white gown, tiny white, feathered wings folded along it’s back, hanging spread eagled in mid-air. The display was set to a vacant channel, medium blue prisming off shining cords made of braided angel hair which secured it to the walls by chubby wrists and ankles.

Flint moved in closer, lower, tilting under it so that he could look the cherub in the eye. The cherub, for it’s part, tried to chew through the gag made from the same hair as the cords, eye’s flared with panic and hatred. It’s fear smelled like roses too long in the vase.

“Oh, come now, it’s not that bad.” Flint regarded the cherub a moment, fondness softening the lines that marked his face. Eyes locked, the cherub’s blue to Flint’s pale gray. In that instant, Flint felt the pull of decency and surrendered himself to it. He saw the person he could be, if only he wished. Such was the power of the image, that it flooded Flint’s body with an unfamiliar warmth; intense and electric.

The shock of this backed him up a step. He looked down, cherishing the feeling, the connectedness to the greater plan of the universe, the peace. He breathed in deeply, raised a quarter-sized tarnished silver hoop to his mouth and exhaled slowly and completely. Flint finally placed the now black hoop in his pocket and stood again, his voice a bit unsteady, “Thank you...thank you so much, I’d forgotten...” Flint’s voice drifted off, clearly lost in thought. Ancient eyes narrowed, sensing an opening.

Too bad for Cupid, Flint snapped out of it. “Well, look, I’ll be back in a few hours to check in. I...” his voice broke for a moment, seeming to age in hundred years in an instant, “Thank you. Really.” He thumbed another button on the control, the blue was replaced by garish flashing headlines, blaring horns, and military drums. The words, FOXNEWS flew across the screen in regal serif.

Cupid’s chubby body sagged against it’s bonds, eyes now staring unblinkingly at the screen like a rabbit hypnotized by oncoming headlights. In the corner of each of it’s perfectly blue eyes, a perfect tear gathered, grew, and dropped into the bowl, ringing with a tone straight from the celestial choir. The first of many.

Flint backed away, closing and locking the door behind him. He paused a moment, straightened himself and his suit with a graceful pull, put the control back on the shelf, and returned to the window. Perhaps the wind had changed.

First

This is mostly going to be used to get ideas and stories out into the world. I'll probably put the first thing up in the next day or so.

We'll see.