Satan Burger

by Carlton Mellick III

“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.

  Bitteris 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.

  It all started when she was eleven and going through puberty. All her friends were boys, of course, and would talk about a thing called masturbation. (Richard Stein, by the way, said that masturbation is God’s gift to ugly people who have trouble finding any other way of obtaining sexual gratification, like myself.) They told her it’s all about fantasizing intercourse with the opposite sex. But she always felt she was the opposite sex, so she couldn’t fantasize about boys without feeling gay, and she thought of girls as stupid and disgusting, so both sexes were ruled out. The only person she could think of that she loved was Jesus — let me remind you she didn’t know the difference between Jesus-love an
d sex-love back then — so the savior, Jesus Christ, became her first masturbation fantasy.

  Nowadays Nan masturbates to paintings of him all the time.

  Around Christmas, you can see a strange glimmer in her eyes, like the spirit of Christmas is generating all kinds of nerve-tinglings on her insides, forcing her squeeze-excited. Even the nativity scenes get her sweat glands drip-drip-dripping.

  Gin says that sometimes she’ll let out a BIG Ho! Ho! Ho! when she climaxes on him. “I think I like that,” he says. Christmas is a happy time for Gin too.

  The strangest part of Nan’s Jesus-sex fantasies is that she gets the most aroused by visualizing Jesus going to the bathroom. She likes to picture him on a toilet, or crouching down in the bushes, or peeing over a balcony onto a crowd of his followers. Sometimes she imagines dropping a log on Jesus while he is being crucified (Richard Stein says that when you drop a log of sexual excrement onto your partner it is called a Hot Carl or sometimes a Dirty Sanchez, if you were wondering) or even squatting over his face to pee in his mouth.

  Richard Stein said that the whole process of digestion and egestion of waste material is considered sexually stimulating to many people, even though it’s socially unacceptable to admit. However, very few people dare to watch that kind of thing and even less dare to participate in the act.

  Nowhere does Stein mention anything about Jesus Christ being actively involved in sexual performances with excrement or being dominated on his crucifix. It’s not a very common topic for discussion, I am guessing.

  I go to the inside of an autocar:

  Stag — a shirtless guy with spiked hair and a tattoo of his own face on his face — is indulging in his favorite pastime: drunk driving. The road is empty and Gin in the passenger seat changing through radio stations and nervous-sweating over it, as if it’s dangerous to leave one on for over a second.