by Garrett Cook
“Sorry, I’m Cass.”
“Reiko. As I said. Jones is in, Leon. He’s been expecting you and Lud.” She doesn’t make any more effort to make strangers feel acknowledged in spite of the geisha wear.
She leads us into the warehouse and we discover it to be a combination pool hall, bachelor pad and shrine to bad taste in the late 70s. The room is lit by multitudes of little tables with lava lamps on them and overhead disco balls. It is dominated at the center by a round, purple velvet couch overlooking a truly enormous plasma screen TV. A few feet away, angled to face the big TV is an expensive-looking pool table, custom made with purple felt instead of the standard green. The room explains the doorbell with astounding clarity. Although what explains the doorbell best is the man sitting on the giant couch, tossing an empty bottle of cough syrup on the floor as though it were a beer he just killed watching the football game. He’s dressed a bit like the Tom Petty interpretation of the Mad Hatter in that video, but truth be told his face looks more like the actual Mad Hatter on account of his thin, sunken features and large nondescript triangle of a nose. All of this pimp paraphernalia belongs to a five foot tall one- hundred-something-pound white guy. He gives Leon the “one moment “sign as his cell phone rings. It rings out Carl Douglas’ Kung Fu fighting. Now that I’ve gone down this crazy rabbithole, it seems somehow appropriate to have run into a kind of Mad Tea Party.
“Hello, Inscrutability Jones is on the phone,” he says in a Southern tinged Isaac Hayes/ old bluesman kind of voice that is probably not an act.
“Amanda, you say? Nice to hear from a man who knows what he wants. Amanda it is. Thanks for callin’.” Jones folds up his cell phone and Yoko gets out hers, concealed in a little holster in the folds of her kimono.
“Hi, Amanda?” she says, the girl she’s calling having picked up the cell phone on the first ring, “Got a job. You know the guy. Yup, that guy. See ya later.” Jones nods at Yoko and then stands, extending his hand to Jeremy.
“Inscrutability Jones, king of the Connecticut underworld. Any friend of Lud’s is a friend of mine and I can only assume that you, sir are a friend of Lud’s.”
“Hi.” Jeremy looks over at me and we are united in our confusion. Maybe he too wonders if this is in fact a strange dream.
Jones takes my hand and kisses it. “And you, pretty girl?”
“I’m Cass. That’s Jeremy.” As I introduce myself Jeremy begins to rock back and forth on his feet, embarrassed by not remembering to do the same when told.
“Very nice to meet you,” says Jones, who turns to Leon, “what you got for me today? I was very pleased with last week’s haul. You’re damn good, Leon. Ain’t seen nobody take the carburetor out of a car fast as you have.”
“Well, you’ll just have to wait and see, Jones,” says Leon with a smile. Reiko takes a shopping cart that is propped up against the pool table and wheels it outside, joining him.
“He’s a friend,” Lud tells Jones, “he’s gonna help the lightning strike. He sees the page and he’s gonna break the machines, I think. I think he can do it.”
“Yeah, he’s a big guy. Don’t look especially dumb, either. Not much of a talker, but he don’t look like there’s nothin’ goin’ on in his head. I think I can help him out. Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, General.” Jones looks Jeremy over again and puts his hand on his chin.
“You know, if you gonna break somethin’, you come to the right guy. Somethin’, somebody, you come to the right guy. I’m somethin’ of a jack of all trades, bein’ the king of the Connecticut underworld and all. I might have some things for you.”
“I’ve got money,” Jeremy answers, trying to straighten up and look cool. It makes me realize that in spite of the fact that he’s killed three hundred and something people, Jeremy hasn’t even bought pot before. It’s kind of funny watching him figure out just how he’s supposed to deal with an actual criminal.
Leon and Reiko wheel in the car parts. I marvel at how fast they do it. There’s about sixty pounds of the things in that shopping cart and it took them all of a minute. About a second per pound of car parts. The little portable junkyard they made causes Jones to light up and bounce to his feet. He walks up to the cart and eyeballs it.
“I’ll give you a thousand newspapers and forty pounds of Vietnamese ramen.” Leon looks to Lud, who shakes his head.
“No papers. You help him out,” he tells Lud, “he’s got a big fight, big fight ahead. Don’t need no papers today, give him some weapons, something to help him split open the machines.”
“I thought as much, General,” Jones replies and he walks to a spot behind the huge TV, lifting up a trap door.
“Come on down to the basement. I got plenty of shit down here to help you do whatever you gotta do, kill whoever you gotta kill.”
Jeremy, Reiko, Jones, Lud and I walk down the stairs underneath the trapdoor to find ourselves in something out of a James Bond movie. The warehouse’s basement is huge, dominated at the center by a camouflaged helicopter equipped with a pair of machine guns. On the walls are armaments of all kinds, big guns, little guns, grenades, knives, battle axes, medieval lances, katanas, throwing stars, maces and flails, every implement of destruction imaginable. It reminds me what a big fight there is. Big enough maybe that all of this stuff won’t even matter in the end. But I can’t think like that. This guy is an edge, the most important one we have, maybe. The fact that he was upstairs swilling Robitussen, and is a pimp and an arms dealer who buys stolen car parts off of homeless people in exchange for old newspapers and ramen becomes moot. That’s pretty strange, because pimping and selling helicopters is the sort of thing I usually don’t forgive in people.
“I’m gonna be nice,” says Jones, “I was gonna give Lud five hundred in newspaper, but, I guess store credit should go further in these exchanges. You got a thousand. Walk around, talk it over with the lady, then tell me what you like.”
Jeremy says nothing in reply to all of this, but just looks around awestruck and sort of overwhelmed. Reiko puts her hand on my shoulder.
“This might take awhile,” she whispers, “I think you could use an ice cream cone.”
She’s definitely right. I could certainly, beyond a shadow of a doubt use an ice cream cone. The suggestion just seems kind of weird coming out of Yoko’s mouth. But, today I’ve developed a knack for going with the flow, and it’s gotten us a thousand bucks in sundry armaments, so I don’t take it as something strange.
“Yeah, I could use an ice cream cone.”
“Cool, meet me outside.”
I give Jeremy a kiss goodbye. “Where are you going?” he asks.
“Ice cream,” I answer. He shrugs and I wait outside for Reiko.
The girl who comes out is unrecognizable. Under the geisha wig she has shoulder length blonde hair. She wears a Red Sox hat, a black blouse and a pair of denim shorts. She’s damn cute and as I figured, not actually Asian. Her posture is far less stiff as she leads me out to her car, a black Mini Cooper, which is parked next to Jones’ car. Jones’ car is (not surprisingly) a big, red limo with a vanity plate that says “IDOSHIT”. I can’t help but laugh and she can’t help but laugh too.
“He takes the pimp thing a little too far sometimes,” she laughs.
“Kind of an understatement.”
The ice cream place is a little one that looks like it’s been around for fifty years. A tacky, plastic polar bear adorns the roof. I get a big mint chocolate chip cone, while Yoko opts for plain old strawberry. I eat a little fast as we sit and talk about how life is funny.
“How can you work for somebody that crazy?” I have to ask, “What do you do?”
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she says, “I don’t go out on jobs. I’ve been taking self defense classes since Jones found me on the street seven years ago. He would never send me out on a job that he intended for me to finish. My official position is Martial Arts Killing Machine.”
“That must be fun.”
“I�
�ve broken a lot of kneecaps, incurred a lot of sterility. Most Johns feel real sorry for not paying up when a strange Asian girl shows up and offers to give them a free vasectomy with her fist.”
I shudder a bit. “But how can you work for somebody that crazy? How can you do that?”
“How can you love somebody crazy enough to run around with General Lud? How come you came to Connecticut? We do what we have to.”
In my mind’s eye, I watch Jeremy browse the room full of guns. We do what we have to. But I still think Connecticut is really fucking weird.
Mr. 400 Strikes
I’ve practiced shooting with these contacts in, and it’s tough, but necessary. The mouth full of fake vampire fangs makes my elocution terrible, but I can work with it, too. Hell, it’s better than my outfit was last time I was here, and I’m pretty certain that the two or three people here who might recognize me won’t, so it’s more than worth it. And I have to say, I love the shirt. Cass says she’ll make another without the question mark when she knows I’ve hit 400. Her Reap appreciation is getting in the way a little, but I’m not going to scorn her for it and there is no sense making false claims. I’ve got twenty two more to go and I know that there are more than enough of those monsters out there to make it. I smile at the mocking imitation of Godless Jack in the mirror. A monstrous joke just like the real one, and cheaply done at that. It gets the message across. I do up the plaid shirt over the tee and get ready to check our supplies.
“Are you sure these are real military issue flashbangs?” Cass asks me, voice thick with skepticism.
“I think Jones knows his merchandise pretty well. He’s scum, but I don’t think he’d give us fakes.”
“Cause otherwise, we’re going to have to take down security and beat the cops to the Safe Zone.”
“We’re disguised, and that’s not our car.”
“Thank God,” Cass mutters.
“There’s a Camaro engine in the thing.”
“The body however is a 79 Dodge Dart.”
“Well, that way the cops won’t think there’s anything under the hood.”
The money from all those feigned burglaries went remarkably far. I’d never bought a car for 140 bucks before, let alone a seventy five dollar shotgun. The crown prince of the Connecticut underground may be skuzzy, dishonest and addicted to any substance he can get through a funnel, but the bargains can’t be beat. The duct taped plastic barrel makes me as nervous as Cass is about the flashbangs, but it gets through metal detectors. As do the pistols in their plastic sheaths. Allay your concerns, Lud said, or the thunder of God don’t strike true. If the thunder of God don’t strike true, then the earth shall be coated in steel and silicon and…allay your concerns or the thunder of God don’t strike true. Faith, luck and figuring out what the fuck is that you’re doing don’t hurt either.
“Shotgun…”
“It’s here. Survival knife?”
Cass pulls it from her red harlequin boots and even in my nervous state; I have to start stifling an erection. “Pistols?”
“Uh huh. The beeper?”
“Yup.”
I find that the door has never felt so far away. Several states worth of desert seem stretch between it and the bedroom. I don’t bother looking out the window because I know that the sky is an ominous blue-grey and there’s nothing out there to make what I’m doing tonight any easier. Nothing out there is going to turn me into the superhero I’m posing as, no matter how many Dark Ones I’ve defeated and dirty little monsters I have kept from polluting the earth, this does not get any easier. The time has come to begin the splitting of the machine, to seek the path to the glorious rain of shrapnel that will purge the world of monsters.
There must be some kind of divine providence on my side since Cass puts the key in the ignition and the Paleolithic mass of scrap manages to pass for alive. Not only that, but it comes with a very satisfying rumble. Wonders never really cease sometimes. Cass is pretty astonished.
“Somehow he got a Camaro engine into this car.”
“Well, it comes from Hartford’s finest chop shop. Anything they make’s pretty much guaranteed to get away from the cops.”
She gives me the kind of dirty look that makes me want to apologize for something. I don’t know what, but that look makes me know that there must be something.
“I shouldn’t have eaten that last ice cream sandwich.”
The dirty look vanishes and is replaced by confusion. She purses her lips. “Don’t act so confident. It makes me nervous. Always makes me feel like I’m the only one who’s scared and thinks we’re gonna die. I know from your journal that’s probably not true. So, please, don’t act like it.”
I lay my head on her shoulder and she remembers that when it comes down to it, I’m no good at speaking my mind. I can write things out, but I’m just no good at saying what I feel. I’m glad she knows I’m not that sure about this excursion. Head on her shoulder, in this ancient and hideous car, I feel a lot more safe and confident than I would in the good car, with my head high, charging into trouble.
“You do think we’ll survive though, right?” What an absurd little boy I make right now in my Godless Jack costume, leaning on her so desperately. But, love inoculates us against embarrassment. I’m grateful I get a few more minutes to be vulnerable before I have to turn myself into an icon. An icon who can gun down a former Bundy winner in a room full of Reap kids without being trampled by the mass of thundering stupidity. Time to do the snakewalk. Try to reassure myself with its similarity to the word “cakewalk.” I’ve also never found cakewalks particularly pleasant either.
I smell the Dark Ones and their ooze in the air as we get closer. I smell the branding of people’s brains and the stench of hot metal. Where is the grey matter? Where is the skin? Oils of all kinds, bestial musk. Don’t tell yourself something stupid like “I’m fighting for the future”. You’re fighting for these people to have options. Even if you hate them, hate them as people, fight for the option to hate organically instead of hating the inorganic in everything. Hatred and resentment without compassion is animalistic. Hate compassionately. Don’t be an animal, too easy to control. All those bastards with brains like dogs aren’t going to have them much longer.
Don’t trust the smell anyway. It’s a metaphor. It’s your way of rationalizing it. It’s all just an attempt to make sense of the insanity around you. It’s a dialogue between neuroses. All it is. The time has come to move in a straight line. Strike true. If the thunder of God don’t strike true, then…think of Cass, think of the America you do this for. Don’t think of the enemy and the stench. She swears to me it’s just how I read the horrors I see, how I process it. Perceptual device to make moral decisions simple and straightforward instead of naturally ambiguous as is the nature of a…but then again, I smell the oil and the musk of beasts and the disgusting black… never mind what’s waiting to be born. You are not at this club to purify anything. You are here to send a message. Ignore the face of the enemy on your own face as it grins at you derisively. It is in the nature of enemies to mock, to be a dark reflection of your…I have a shotgun. I will think like a man who has a shotgun. You son of a bitch, I have a shotgun. Convincing. Really.
I wish the drive had been longer. I step out and get into line right behind a couple of Bundy girls checking each other’s makeup.
“I prefer the Sound and the Fury, actually.”
“Haven’t read any Faulkner yet.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nah, I just haven’t gotten to it. And to be honest, it depresses the fuck out of me. Decaying mansions in the South, families falling apart, it’s all so…”
“Reap is tragedy. The tragedy of lost humanity and moral confusion, Brit. Faulkner is so Reap. Poe had something going, torture, ghosts, murder. The apocalyptic charm is there, but too much is post-mortem, he’s already dead, and Reap preaches that there’s no sense fixating on the dead. And there’s too much remorse in it. Everything’s alre
ady gone on most of the time, or else the murder’s not the point. It comes down to the guilt and the haunting and the poetic justice. The crime scene tape is the moment of discovery, and sometimes the moment of ecstasy, the murder itself, and the knowledge that it WILL happen again. Faulkner’s like that. Poe lives in the graveyard, and Faulkner the slaughterhouse. He saw that America was going to start eating itself alive, and there wasn’t shit people can do. Don’t you see what we’re doing tonight? Bait. We’re acknowledging that we, as human beings, as Americans, are fuckin’ bait. And what do we do about it?”
I’m interested. It always surprises me when people are actually aware of all this. Because of the status quo, it’s so easy to think you’re the only one who knows that the shit is going down and that nobody else is aware of it all. After all, how could intelligent people who aren’t cattle, robots or completely feral let things be like this? Maybe it won’t be so hard reaching some of these people. Might walk away with some respect or understanding from this crowd yet. Brit shrugs and her well read friend continues on.
“Latch onto something. Some absent glimmer of love. Reap is the absent glimmer. An ironic violence against the natural violence of living. To love and exalt in the blood, in the condition of postmodern destruction is the thing. It’s the only logical response we have. And it’s a delicious one. We’re the only ones smart enough to see that everything around is shit. The world, America, our souls, it’s all gone to shit. And if everything’s gonna be shit, you need to be smart. You need to be the ecstatic pig that rolls around in all that shit, takes it in and in this fuckin’ void, gets some experience, excitement and understanding. Decay, absence, mute witness, oppression, it’s all fuckin’ Reap. You’ve gotta read the Sound and the Fury, cause fuckin’ Faulkner has all the shit figured out and shows us that the brutality and the madness are facts of life and dealing with it is the only way to sleep at night, come every time you get fucked and love your television.”
Well, I still have a shotgun. It’s so much harder when intelligent people believe stupid things. They can give themselves much better reasons to do so, even to the point of immutability. Everything she had to say made sense, every single nihilistic, chickenshit word of it. The kind of arguments that have been used to support every sort of counterproductive repackaged social paralysis that has come off the rock station assembly line for the past forty something years. Why is it the knowledge that we’re all going to shrivel up and die makes people want so much to shrivel up and die? Wonder if they’ll even appreciate the assassination now. Well, she’s right about one thing, society leaves us no recourse but to exalt in violence. No, scratch that. Note to self: I will not exalt. I will count and mourn the dead. Mr. 378. They will count the dead to exalt. I will count the dead to remember the trail of blood that blazes toward freedom. I will know each face that has made the sacrifice for a saner society. I swear none have died in vain.