Life went on in this fashion for nearing five years, and it was bliss.
Looking back on it, we were living life like a pair of fucking Hobbits.
If my life was that movie, I was the slightly overweight, reliable one - I can’t remember his name off the bat, but I think he was a Goonie - and Derwood had the starring role. He was the tall dark hero, windswept and dazzlingly interesting.
A filthy, fuck-able hero for the ages.
The physical attributes linking us to Hobbit-folk only ran so far as my own worldly appearance, I admit.
The days and years all passed by in a sort of stoned daze - as inconsequential as taking a piss in a rainstorm.
Be nice to have a few photographs to reminisce over, but who has time to take photos?
Still, if I ever have kids, I’d like ‘em to know their dad wasn’t always a care-worn shmoe with bloodshot eyes and a tragically balding head.
That said; after this morning’s chain of events, it doesn’t look like I’ll be having any young pups to boast to anytime soon…
Now that the world has kind of fucking ended.
I’m still really fucking shocked by how quickly things went from pretty to shitty on our planet, and practically all in the space of one night.
It was like ‘Black Friday gone global. Six billion people collectively losing their shit, either by flame or by fear.
I was never much of a one for having faith in the human race, but Jesus, things went sour quick…
Anyway, I’ll get to that soon. First, let me finish up with what I’m starting to think of as my ‘defence’…
***
It didn’t occur overnight, but in truth, I think I can accurately pinpoint the moment when my freewheeling existence succumbed to a kind of cancer.
I never started coughing up my life-blood till some time down the road, but the moment when my happy little kingdom began to come crashing down was when I first slapped my eyeballs on Kate Price.
Derwood and I were kicking back in our favourite bar, at that time known as ‘The Little Rock’. It was the kind of establishment that catered to our breed of outcast. The boom-box was always kicking out the jams, and for the most part, the tunes were sound - Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix were commonplace for the more acid-driven kids such as my motley crew; Metallica and Pearl Jam and the like, would keep the grunge and metal crowd happy and knocking back the ales. It was a good mix of people and sounds - the sort of place where the lights were always dim and the vibes were always clean.
If I could have eaten, shit and slept there…I most surely would have.
I believe I’ve done all three on occasion, but not long term.
Anyway, it was on this fine and footloose October night in The Little Rock, when I first caught a glimpse of the single most beautiful specimen of femininity I’d ever beheld.
I was on my fifth Jack and Coke when out of nowhere, this heaven-sent creature approaches me.
Me. The little guy!
She asks me if I’m just gonna stare all day or if I’m gonna buy her a drink. Despite her somewhat clichéd cattiness, I must admit it took me more than a few moments to compose myself as this goddess stood before me with an unspeakably sexy half-smile painted on her luscious lips. She was taller than me, had legs that could destroy Tokyo and a set of pillows on her that could make a grown man beg for buttermilk. Long flowing hair, dark and straight, hung over her porcelain face. Her dark, smiling eyes seemed to sing of pleasures and sins previously unknown to mortal man, and her body…that body was the back-up band that looked ready and eager to play all night long.
Perhaps I’d helped enough old ladies cross the road in my time, or handed enough cash out to the town’s local bums to gain the almighty’s favour. Who really knows? But at that moment, the little guy got the girl.
Even Derwood was speechless.
Though in true Derwood fashion, my noble compadre never once thought to cut in. Instead he - like this sex-drenched space-girl - simply waited.
And waited, and waited.
Did I tell you I was no Don Juan?
Eventually I managed to drool out a response to her question, (if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this shit, kids), and by some miracle my response must have been both charming and literate, because within six hours, she was in my bed, on her hands and knees and as naked as the day the doctor slapped her butt - which is exactly what I was getting down to in the bed, as it happens.
I fell in love and in lust with Kate the moment we met. I was doomed from the very start, man. Average guys like me get to jack-off to this sort of lady, but we never get to share fluids with them in the real world, know what I mean?
And it wasn’t just her outer beauty that caught hold of me so completely. She had an inner light that burned so bright it could drive a man spitfire-insane. That first night, after we fucked and lay there soaked and spent, she told me of her life. It was quite a tale…
Here was a gal who had seen innumerable hard times, and had travelled far and wide searching for herself. She’d went from New York and down to LA, had hung with the hippies and had chased the sun, (and the dragon), for the best part of her young life. She had no folks to speak of, having been abandoned by them when she was just a kid, and no fixed address. She was, in short, my idea of perfection. A spaced out, free-flying lunar-girl. An ethereal cereal I wanted to feast on every morning for the rest of my damn life.
We talked all through the night, interspersed with some more gentle lovemaking, and by the time the dawn had come calling, I was ready to get on one fucking knee and propose to this gypsy princess...
We were married in a small, humanist ceremony attended only by close friends and family on my side. Kate only had her Mother on her side, but that woman was as proud as any I've ever seen of her daughter back then.
It was the happiest day of my life. I was ready to give her my whole world - body, mind and soul.
Turns out she was only interested in the soul part.
Go figure…
***
I’m still not sure of the exact moment that things went south for us. The first year of our shotgun marriage was a wondrous blur of sounds, sights, laughter and lovemaking. We embraced the world like big fat bastards at a buffet. We lived for the day and damned the dark. She moved in with me and Derwood, and the three of us lived like some sort of fucked-up hippy family He the cool brother and me the lucky lover. We were adrift on a wave of youthful abandon and it was the best year of my life, what I can remember of it leastways.
What goes up must eventually come crashing down, though, and Kate flew higher than most. Her appetite for psychedelics was enormous, and she could drink a fucking Viking under the table. It was beginning to dawn on me that my damaged little space-girl was a lot more damaged than I’d first thought. What was once poetic was steadily becoming tragic.
Life rolled on, though, as it always does, and Kate and I looked forward.
After that first year, we decided it was time to start looking for a place of our own. We found the perfect apartment on Almond Street, just far enough off the beaten track to safely avoid temptations. See, by this point, I was getting a little worried about Kate’s behaviour. She was putting back more cocaine than could ever be deemed healthy, even in our hedonistic circle, and the drinking had reached a kind of fever pitch. She’d been arrested four times in two months, and had even done a few weeks inside for possession with intent to sell.
Now, as you’re already aware, I like my chemicals, but I’m not a fucking lunatic. I lead, or led, a simple existence - fun, friends and frivolity. Hard drugs were an occasional thing for me; a kind of guilty pleasure, but for Kate, getting stoned off her ass was a way of life.
The whole thing came to a pretty conclusive head one night when she’d arrived home drunk as all shit and crying her eyes out. I was already asleep when she crawled in the door, having spent the night hanging with Derwood and watching some old horror movies on the internet. My head had hit the pi
llow at around 11pm, and it was close to 3am was when Kate dragged her carcass back to our abode. She slumped on the edge of the bed, and through a veil of tears and running mascara, proceeded to confess her sins to Father Donnie.
Turns out that earlier that night she’d dropped half a dozen ecstasy tablets, and had went on something of a booze-fuelled rampage around the local bars. She recalled a lot of dancing and a lot of tequila, and then, at some point during the evening she had lost consciousness. When she came to, she was being violently ass-fucked by some sweaty, drunken Neanderthal in some shit-stained men’s room.
She told me she was so numb from the drugs, she never knew she was being reamed until the whole thing was over, and the sleazy rapist bastard had finished with her and pulled his slimy cock from her battered hole. He’d left her lying there on the piss soaked floor, with her skirt round her ankles and his spittle running down the back of her neck. This, kids, was the last fucking straw.
It was twelve steps or a dead stop.
***
What I’ve learned -if I’ve learned anything - is that some things can never be mended. Some things that are broken just can’t be put back together again, no matter how much you will them to or how much love and care you put into the repairing.
Though I hadn’t known it on meeting and falling for her, and though she had successfully hidden her sizable array of demons very well for the first year of our life together, Kate was broken. Stone cold broken. The mask had slowly fallen off, the armour had cracked in her psyche and the demons had come charging out. I still loved her - God, did I love her - but I was beginning to understand that there was little I could do to help her. You’ve all heard that old saying about a person having to help themselves before they can accept help from others? Well, that was Kate. It took some filthy rapist banging her in some god-forsaken shit-stall before she finally realised just how far down the dark path she’d trodden.
Despite my encroaching sense of helplessness, I rose to the challenge, deeming it my noble duty to save my wife - to bring her out of the darkness and into the light, any way I could. And so after some gentle persuasion, and the promise to remain by her side through hell and high water, Kate agreed to seek some professional help.
And that’s when things got really bad.
***
It was four weeks after attending her first counselling and group therapy sessions that my dear damaged Kate started questioning her faith, and a further two weeks before she stated in no uncertain terms that she had, found God’.
Fine…no problem, thought I. I knew these damn twelve step classes were infamous for forcing faith onto the weakened minds of those poor souls whose paths led them there, but I saw little harm in my Kate finding some solace and strength in faith. If a little loving from Jesus could help her overcome her demons, I welcomed it. Hell, I encouraged it to begin with.
When she started reading the bible, I quietly and respectfully left her to it. I still had my Richard Laymon collection to keep me sane - who was I to judge?
When she started attending church once on Sunday and one night through the week, I quietly and respectfully left her to it, once again.
When she ever-so-tentatively asked me to join her one Sunday, I agreed, (not without a little apprehension, mind you), as I was doing nothing that night and had to admit to being a little curious as to what went on in those, ‘temples of the faith’. I continued to go with her many time more, even though I had no faith of my own. I let her believe that I believed.
Yep, I’d done all this and more, and felt pretty damn fine about myself for doing it. I never believed for one second in any of it, but my love, who had so recently been teetering on the abyss, had finally found something she could hold onto, that wouldn’t hold onto her.
Or so I thought…
Kate took to religion with the same manic fervour she took to narcotics. She’d slowly but surely weaned herself off of dirty physical habits, and replaced them with dirty spiritual ones. No simple, god-loving churchgoing endeavours for Kate - she leapt head first into the sort of fundamentalism that scared most good Christians rigid. Within a few months of us leaving our old apartment and heading off on our own; Kate had went from sin-loving drug-dustbin to Jesus-preaching head-case.
It was only a month after that, that her church decided she wasn’t welcome anymore in their circle.
See, these were garden variety Christians, man - they loved their families, they done their best to be good people and they kept their religion, and opinions on matters of social morality, to themselves. They respected all others in our humble little community and were respected back in kind, by one and all.
But Kate…Kate was the fucking Mother from ‘Carrie’.
I don’t know what she said or done to find herself kicked from the flock, but from her behaviour at home, I had a pretty good idea…
Our once humble crib was no longer adorned with posters of Jim Morrison or Arthur Lee. Now the place looked like the fucking Vatican. Crosses were hung everywhere, and the poetry and lyrics that once were framed and cherished, had been tossed in the trash, replaced with doom-laden verses from the bible and pictures of good old Jesus, (with white skin and blue eyes, too, I noticed). She’d make me say grace at dinner, and she’d all but given up on sex.
“Not unless we’re making a baby. Otherwise it’s not God’s good will” she’d say.
As you can imagine…blowjobs and butt-sex were the first to go. Soon, the rest went with ‘em, quietly into the night.
My once shining beacon of freedom and love had become a goddam crazy lady, and was still only 23 years old. Now you tell me…how are you supposed to work with that?
Before I knew it, she was proclaiming my beloved weed and beer to be the devils wares, and was convinced I’d burn in the eternal ovens of Hell should I not give myself to Jesus.
She had me lay down all my favourite movies, and demanded I stop reading the, “filth that you think passes as fiction.”
She sold all my beautiful vinyl records - collectors’ items and all - behind my back, and when I lost my rag with her, she calmly, arrogantly gestured to me for a fucking hug, and stated she was “saving me.”
I’d lost the real Kate, and somehow, somewhere along the line - I lost myself as well.
***
It didn’t happen right away, but as the months and then years rolled on, my love for her morphed into a sort of twisted, creeping dependence.
I stopped seeing my friends simply because she thought they were a bad influence on me.
I was weighing up the consequences. It came to seem that to hit the pub or visit a friend would only lead to extreme grief back at home, and I figured it wasn’t worth it.
I now know that this is how a person comes to find themselves in an abusive relationship.
The old version of Donnie would have scoffed at such a notion, but here I was - drink and drug free, friend free, and trapped in a relationship with no love and no mutual respect.
Fuck only knows when it happened, but after a time, she’d systematically worn me down to nothing. A shell with no one to turn to but the person who’d managed to imprison me. Men used their fists to beat into submission the spirit of their women; woman on the other hand, used something even more insidious…love.
Forgive me if I sound a little forlorn or pathetic here…it’s just that reliving this shit gives me the blues. I ain’t looking for sympathy, folks, merely understanding.
You see, if you push a man so far from himself, two things will happen: he’ll snap and leave your sorry ass for pastures new, or if he’s of less strong stock, he’ll succumb and give himself over completely. And that, dear people, is exactly what I did.
I’d long since packed in my job at Hershel’s, and had found myself, (at Kate’s request), a desk job working in life-insurance. Kate felt that working in a bar would put me in far too close vicinity to the grasping claws of temptation, and was adamant that it was time I grew up, fixed myself up with a re
al job, and replaced my long hair and flares with a flea-bitten sixty dollar suit and a crew cut. With no fight left in me to speak of, I went along with her demands. I feel like a weak-minded sonofabitch saying it now, but I had no sense of myself by that time.
Thinking on it now, the one thing to which I hadn’t succumbed was her love of the Lord. Shit, man; I’d never been any kind of believer anyway, and now I saw the fucker as the enemy. How strange to have an enemy that you don’t even believe exists…
He’d taken my Kate into his warm embrace and mangled her head into unfathomable new shapes that, so help me, made me pine for the drug-addled rape victim of old.
Anyone who’s been in this sort of situation and escaped will tell you the same thing, be they make or female - love has nothing to do with it.
Love becomes a by-word for dependence and weakness.
Insecurity and doubt stealthily replace passion and lust, and all those memories of when you first met this person who you adamantly believed was your soul-mate while flowers fucking bloomed in your heart…well, that’s all nothing more than dust and ash, friends.
Christ, I’m depressing myself reliving this shit. God only knows how you guys are feeling. I set out to tell a tale of the strangest day of my life, and it’s become a goddamn confessional. I’m starting to think I should have left you to your assumptions about my character and got down to the nitty-gritty…
So, that being said, and my wounds being freshly fucking open, let me tell you how the world ended.
***
We’d been awoken to the sound of sirens at around 4am.
Far in the distance at first, and in small numbers; the symphony of urban sounds soon became a cacophony. They were drawing ever closer. I was sat up in our bed in seconds. Kate just laid there, eyes open and a look of numb Buddha calm on her face.
Consumed - Volume 1: An Extreme Horror Anthology. Page 7