Satan Burger is at the top of the hill — a jagged steep prick with blackened earth and a step-path seven minutes long. The drive-thru is a lift that pulls your car up the side of the rock face to a pay window. I can see the lift rocking about way up there, and there’s a menu on it so you can decide what deep-fried burger you want before you reach the top.
We can’t see much from here, so I use my God’s eyes to climb up the steps. I see that it is a white building with the red letters S and B established on the rooftop. It doesn’t seem different than any other fast food chain, aside from the fact that Satan himself is the owner/manager and not to mention the strange vegetation that grows on the top of the hill.
The vegetation looks like a forest of black thorn-weeds, tall as trees, wrinkled and crawling like vines, squirreling and generating small scratchy-twitter sounds. The plant leaks a red liquid that people are supposed to believe is blood, so it appears like an evil place. Maybe they are man-eater trees that came out of the walm, or maybe Satan brought them from hell. We keep away from them, in any case. No telling what they are capable of.
Richard Stein said that Satan was kicked out of Heaven for being a snob. He thought he was the best angel up there, because God loved him the best. And when God decided to love something else (Child Earth) Satan had a hissy fit and called God a chum-chum, which was considered an insult back in the days before Man was created.
Sometimes you’ll hear someone call a friend a chum. Whenever God hears this from Heaven, He starts laughing his ass off at the someone’s friend, who just smiles clueless of the insult. One thing God does not like to be called is a c hum-chum. Another is an idiot. Another is wrong. Telling God that He is wrong is probably the stupidest thing you can possibly do, because He is never wrong, and He’ll make your life wrong and your brain wrong and your face wrong just to make you regret putting the words God and wrong in the same sentence, unless the sentence is this: God is never wrong, he knows everything about everything.
Strangely, however, God finds being called a fuck-o or a fuck-face an amusing performance: after all, these are very fun words to say when you’re angry. They launch off your tongue like fists.
I go back to my skin to step out of the Gremlin autocar, preparing my wire muscles for a steep hike, rubbing them with needlelike fingers. I replace some old Gremlin breath with the coldy-crisp air, fresh for the system, wakens me up for the premature morning. It is still silent out, and the streets are still dead, not a living thing in the vicinity. It doesn’t bother me right now. The morning light is comforting. It is a shame that most people miss this time of day. Personally, I’d prefer to sleep through twilight than dawn.
Satan Burger is not actually on the top of the hill. It’s a little closer than halfway. We get there pretty easily, although irritated by Vodka’s moan for German food instead of corporate death burger.
Near the door of the restaurant, a box holds a sign up that says, “Help NEEDED!”
Behind the restaurant, there’s a small trail that continues up the steep hill, and near the opening of the trail there’s a table with a sign telling us, “Now approaching scorpion fly zone. NO female baboons allowed!”
Upon entering Satan Burger, the only customer we notice besides ourselves is a small troll that only speaks ancient druidic languages. He sits in the corner and minds to himself, drinking a black cup of coffee and reading a collection of surfing anecdotes.
A cigarette machine greets us in the entranceway. It has two signs: “Come this way” and “Two Newports for the price of one!”
The cigarette machine can’t speak, because it doesn’t own a voice box, but I can tell that it would be complaining if it could. It doesn’t have any arms either, so there is no way that it wrote the signs all by itself. Our job is to follow it, maybe decide whether or not the cigarettes are worth buying.
The cigarette machine is our hostess because Satan wants to make it known right off that Satan Burger is a smoking restaurant. It is divided into two sections: smoking and heavy smoking. The machine also sells kaffa-bud cigarettes and dippy bob rocks, if you’re into that sort of thing.
We follow the hostess, hobbling all fat-heavy on its tiny legs, toward the front counter, where a cash register winks and waits for our orders. A crowd of tables and chairs watch us as we travel, staring, shifting, screeching across the tile. The entire restaurant — it’s empty of all human employees, run entirely by living furniture.
Satan appears behind the counter.
He is shorter than me, looks middle-aged, with a gray beard and brown-gray hair, a queer smile stretches out his face, wearing a dark suit and red tie, and there’s a pin that says Gay Pride with a picture of a smiling penis that resembles a cartoon worm going into a butthole.
Mortician sees the pin and hides behind Christian and Vod, whispering, “I told you. I told you he’s gay.”
Mort is what Richard Stein would have called homophobic. It’s a phobia usually caused by one of three things:
1) Being raised to believe homosexuals are socially unacceptable.
2) Not coming in contact with any homosexuals during the adolescent period.
3) Being gay and afraid to accept it.
Not too many people are homophobic anymore. Nobody cares enough to hate or fear anyone/anything. The word faggot is no longer an insult. And there are no more active second-wave skinheads or nazis or rednecks to go faggot-bashing. So faggots are safe from oppression. But they have no interest in going to gay bars and are therefore not actively faggotting, which makes the entire gay and lesbian society a waste of time.
Satan may be the last homosexual on Earth that wears pro-gay pins.
Richard Stein said that fighting for gay rights and parading gay pride are two things that homosexuals publicly enjoyed. If these two things didn’t exist, there probably wouldn’t be as many gays around, because many people find parades and fighting for rights attractive enough to become gay. Stein also said that some people become gay just to be different than everyone else. They don’t want to conform to the sexual preferences that authority has bestowed upon them.
In other words: GAY = ANARCHY.
Satan continues his queer grinning for five minutes. We watch him, scared to interrupt.
Then Satan goes into question. “Are you here for food or employment?”
Christian is our speaker. “Maybe both.”
I didn’t think about the help needed sign until now. Christian always talks about getting a job, but he never actually gets one. I would get a job too, but it’s almost hopeless with my eyes. We apply for jobs everywhere we can, but never get a response or even an interview. Mort, whose always been a worker, calls Christian and I lazy assholes for never working, but we don’t seem to care. Nowadays, the only person you can find in this world is the type that falls into the lazy asshole category.
“You’re the young man that rented me a room,” Satan finally notices Mort, “aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Mort says. “These are my roommates, Leaf and Christian.”
“Christian?” Satan tweaks. “That’s an offensive name to me.” He’s actually joking when he says this, but nobody takes it as a joke.
“Sorry,” Christian apologizes, as if he had something to do with naming himself.
“Don’t worry about it.” Satan waves his hand in a circle. “You’re all okay by me. Well, you are my landlords. The jobs are all yours if you want them.”
“How much do you pay?” Mort asks, still behind Christian.
“I don’t pay in money,” he answers. “Money isn’t going to last much longer anyway. Before the end of the year, the governments are going to say that it isn’t worth the effort and discontinue its value. Dollars will become worthless, and given to the bathrooms for toilet paper. You’ll see.”
“I don’t understand,” Christian says. “You’re talking crazy.”
“I don’t speak crazy,” Satan argues. “Come in the back and I’ll explain.”
We go thr
ough the kitchen to a small office, whose door is angry at us when we open him, waking him up. He hits Mort — last in line — in the back, knobbing him right between two links of spinal column, as if too impatient to wait for him to get completely inside.
“What’s wrong with your door?” Mort complains.
“It’s stubborn and doesn’t like its job,” says Satan. “Sometimes it won’t open at all.”
There are five chairs. We sit in them. All but one of them is alive, the one vodka is sitting in, or maybe it’s just asleep. Mine is either nervous or weak, shifting me from side to back to side, with a wrinkled cushy-plastic seat, making whooshing sounds under my butt.
“How come your door is alive?” Christian asks.
“Yes, everyone notices my furniture, everyone loves the cute little furniture.” A toaster tries to be cute, wagging its cord like a tail. “I’m sick of them!” he screams at the toaster, shoving it off the desk to thump on the floor. “They are so damn annoying.”
“Well, what are they?” Christian asks. “How come they’re alive?”
Satan lights up a thin homosexual-styled cigar and smokes it like a penis, rolling it between his fingers to ash. “They are my demons. Bet you didn’t expect demons to be furniture, did you? Well, there are all sorts of demons. You see, I have the touch of life. Everything I touch becomes a living thing, like that door and those chairs, and everything else that is not living that my fingers come across. Then they become my demons, my servants.”
Christian puts his hand in Satan’s face. “Let me see,” he says, lifting his sleeve to reveal a digital wristwatch. “Make this alive.”
Satan touches the wristwatch.
There is a spark of tiny blue light. Then the digital wristwatch becomes a living creature that eats, sleeps, poops, and maybe even reproduces. It cannot speak, but it can beep.
“Weird,” Christian says, staring at his new pet. “That’s what I call a talent.”
“I call it a curse,” Satan says, pausing to take a puff on his cigar. Next to his cigars are a couple of packs of cigarettes called Lung Suicide and Cancer Pricks. Both of them were invented by Satan himself. “Anyway, I need people here. These demons aren’t working out at all. I’ve got a television trying to cook hamburgers, a cash register that can’t even speak trying to take orders, and a credenza trying to work the drive-thru. The only good they do is clean up the place and hold signs.”
“Why don’t you cook the hamburgers?” Mort asks.
“How the hell can I make hamburgers?” Satan yells. “Every time I touch a hamburger it turns into a demon. Same with fries and vegetables and everything else that isn’t alive. Sure, that’s how I eat my food, but I don’t have a choice considering you can’t eat food without touching it.”
“What about using a fork?” Christian argues.
“Yeah, yeah.” Satan gets annoyed. “That’s what everyone says, but every time I touch a fork to eat, the fork becomes alive. And when I pick up food with it, the fork eats the food before I get a chance to. It’s pretty frustrating. Actually, I don’t mind eating live food — it’s all I’ve been eating since the beginning of time. But customers just won’t stand for eating a live hamburger, you see. They get grossed out and scared, and it’s just not good business to scare away customers with demon food.”
“So you need us to manage your store?” Mort asks.
“Yes, completely.” Satan starts a Cancer Prick cigarette even though he is not done with the cigar. “I’ll still be in charge. I just won’t touch the food or do any of the work.”
“You never told us what we’d get paid,” Mort says.
“I’m getting to that…” Satan smiles.
Lenny’s autotruck pulls into the parking zone outside.
Nan and Gin are in the cab, shivering from the cold and the shock. Gin is dead. He can feel his joints getting all stiff, and thinks his skin is shriveling to rot. Nan takes him out of the autotruck and he stretches his legs. The muscles have no feeling in them, but they still move. He cracks his back and broken neck, hearing the cracking sound but not feeling the relief. Then he cracks his knuckles for the same response.
“Don’t.” Nan grabs his knuckles. “You’re going to get arthritis.”
“Sorry,” Gin says. He doesn’t want to argue. Being dead has brought him down a little, his emotions now at junebug size.
Many people say that you’ll get arthritis from cracking your knuckles, but this is a lie. Some people also think that you’ll mess up your back from cracking it. This is a lie too. Then there are the people that believe that you’ll actually break your neck if you crack it too quickly. These are the same people who say if you cross your eyes too much they’ll stick, you get warts from touching frogs, bubble gum takes seven years to digest, and you’ll go blind if you masturbate too much. All of these things were made up by parents who didn’t want their children to do them.
But most of the parents forgot to tell their children that they were lies once the children were grown up. And the children told their children the same things, thinking they were absolutely true, and the children’s children told their children, and so on.
Then, for awhile, no one knew what to believe, because parents didn’t know what the right thing to believe was, so the little girls were scared of their stomachs getting all fat with a four-pound wad of gum, and little boys thought they were going to go blind, and everyone says their friend’s cousin’s uncle’s sister-in-law’s son’s girlfriend’s brother is a blind warted cross-eyed mute with arthritis who had to have surgery to get all the gum out of his stomach.
At one point, all the parents got together and made up their minds to go ask “The Professionals” whether these things were true or not. But a few days before The Professionals could be contacted for questioning, all of the parents developed a new interest in staring at their walls and shrugging.
Gin and Nan head to the stairs; Nan holds him as he walks. Normally, Gin wouldn’t like to be babied by Nan — she usually thinks he can’t do anything without her help — but this time he doesn’t mind. She’s being nice and caring, which are two things he never gets out of her. Maybe this time he really does need her help.
Lenny stays jerky in his autotruck. Nan yells at him, “You just gonna stay there or what?”
Lenny peeks his nerdy head out of the window. “No, I can’t go in. I can’t handle the smell of corporate death burger. I’ll just listen to some music. I got the new Cauliflower Ass and Bob tape yesterday.”
“Okay, Lenny.” She doesn’t seem to mind leaving him.
I called Lenny’s head nerdy, because that’s what Lenny is. He’s one of those nerdy punks that dress in classic dork clothes with pocket protectors and thick dork-glasses. Most of the time, a nerdy punk’s glasses aren’t even real, they’re just plain glass or sometimes clear plastic, just to emphasize the nerdy punk style.
In other words: NERD = PUNK.
Nerdy punk is one of the most unusual styles of punk. It is not a style of music though, just a clothing style. Hopefully, there will be a super cool nerdy punk band someday, playing all nerdy punk songs, at a nerdy punk music festival with dozens of other nerdy punk bands. Skinheads will go there too. And nerdy punk will never sellout since trendy people hate everything and everyone that is nerdy.
Satan tells us this:
“I’m sure you’ve heard about the walm. It is the door that lets people in from other worlds. This may seem like magic to you, but it is not. Magic is easy. The walm is more on the technical side. Technology is hard. What is the one thing you would not sacrifice for anything in the world?”
Our faces give the expression that we took the question as rhetorical. He realizes this and continues.
“Your soul. Nobody will ever give up their soul. Really nice Christian people will say they’d give up their life for anyone else to live. They say this because they mean it, and really would give up their life to save someone else, no matter how evil or wretched. However, they
only say this because after they die, God is going to love them and accept them into Heaven with the greatest of honors. But they would never give up their souls for anyone. They sacrifice themselves so that they’ll go to Heaven. Would you go to hell or oblivion for someone else? Would anyone do it? Your soul is your everything. Without it, you are nothing.
“Think about this: would a Christian still follow all the Christian rules and standards if he discovered for an absolute fact that God and Heaven do not exist?”
“Maybe,” Christian says, backing the people that call themselves his name.
“Well, you’ll see pretty soon who will and who won’t. Because, as of now, God has turned His back on the world, and nobody else is going to Heaven — no Christian, no human. Everyone either stays here or goes to oblivion. There’s no paradise where the world’s headed. No hell either.”
“What are you getting at?” Mort asks.
“What I’m getting at,” Satan says, “is that souls are leaving people’s bodies all over the world. They are getting sucked out of the left nostril of every human being. Every night, every day, all day long. Haven’t you noticed? The whole world is emotionless. Nobody cares about anything anymore. It’s all because they’ve lost their souls. And it all has to do with the walm. You’ve heard about sillygo, right? Sillygo is created from human souls. Souls are what empower that stupid door so that it will stay open and bring in new people and new animals. In just a month or so, not a single person in the world will have a soul because of that thing. Which puts me out of business. I am a soul collector. My job is to own souls. Without human souls, I’ll be out of business. Without my business, I’ll no longer be the devil. If I’m not the devil, I’ll be human, and then I’ll lose my own soul to sillygo.
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