Thu, 19 May 2005

Clusterfucked
Now we all know Ana wasn’t quite right in the head but hey, we’re willin’ to indulge in a little novelty so long as it don’t hurt nobody or tread to far beyond the boundaries of good taste (like when I became obsessed with Amy Tan’s third kidney or when Matt started thinkin’ he was The Lost Bee-Gee and it was time for “a familial convergence”), but Ana was wading deep, deep, out past where the weeds stopped by the time Christmas had rolled around.

It all started so normal, too: Ana had hung up a string of Christmas lights across the front of her house all tasteful and Rockwellian when the same night, some ring-tailed pigfucker comes up and steals her extension cord. Well, I gave her one of mine and she tapes that thing down so tight a crack-addled Charles Atlas couldn’t rip that sucker off. That night, the same dude comes back and cuts the lights.

Now Ana gets nutty in the winter anyway, it’s in her blood and in her brain and the sunlight that goes through the cold air changes and lessens before it falls through her windows. So she goes right over the side after the above happens and starts thinking it’s an in-house job, starts questioning the people who share her house about “intent and purpose”. She becomes convinced the half-mad dog-woman in apt. 2 has a grudge against Christmas and its varied splendors and decided to call her on it. The dog-woman moved out soon afterward late some night to someplace “where I’ll be better understood”: good luck, sister, good luck.

Now I’m thinking the whole ruckus is dead and buried away when I walk to get my daily bowl of soup down at Eat and come across Ana, cradling a string of lights like a child of wire and glass and her eyes with that fifty-yard stare she gets when she’s been up too long on cheap speed and unfocused paranoia.

“Afternoon, Miss Ana, what’s the good word?”

“No time, no time, got plans. Well, no…(cackles evilly, bwahahahaha)…I can put you to use…”

“My car’s got no gas, and I’m not up for one of your harebrained schemes just now. I’m off to get a new job, me. I shaved and everything.”

“It’ll wait. Besides, I got something you might wanna see.”

Now nothing gets me like intrigue, so I follow mule-to-carrot back to her house. She sets the bundle on the porch and orders me to watch it with my life, which is presently worth about thirty bucks to everyone ‘cept me and fans of my wacky hijinx, which is basically Ana and the Dbhlyr Child Army. Long story. Anyway, she comes back down with something else in her arms, the other brother of the lights, a shaded black efficiency just waiting to serve its purpose.

“Aw no, Ana, don’t tell me, that’s a gun.”

But see, this wasn’t no gun, this was a GUN, a cannon, no, I mean this thing was just huge, sweet god, I’d say Godzillaish but it was bigger even, just nasty looking, like a kid with shattered knees, like eyes sewn shut.

“It’s an eight-gauge. Modified. Been making the shells myself.”

“No shit, Ana, I didn’t even think they made eight-gauge shells in the States anymore. You plan on attacking some architecture or whales or something?”

“Check it. Got it parkerized, chopped the barrel to just over 18 inches, ten-shot tube, and a 11000 candlepower light right…there.”

“Ana, you’re no gunslinger. The recoil would knock you through a wall.”

“Nah. Synth stock. Besides, I’m just shooting rock salt, can’t harm nobody…much.”

Bwahahahaha.

“I’m convinced the crazy dog-woman is coming back, Darren. She gave me this…look when she moved out. Like she was gonna go after my cat or something. Besides, any righteous god would approve.”

So after we re-restrung her lights, she sat on the porch like some shine-sodded killbilly itchin’ to pull a Goetz on any vandal foolish enough to cross her path. Now I haven’t owned a gun since my ex put a couple interesting holes in my back, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, I guess, and I ain’t dumb enough to argue with a woman who has a shotgun across her lap. Fast Eddie Satan comes walking by and I jet off to talk a while with him and forget all about the shotgun mess.

Later that night I get a call.

“Get over here. I got ‘em pinned down in front.”

Couple blocks is normally a short walk unless it’s all icy on the sidewalks, fall on yer ass and can’t get up icy, and by the time I got there a real uneasy peace had settled across her front yard, where the dog-woman looked like she’d rather be just about anywhere else but where she was now.

“AHA!” I pontificated, feeling like Dupin as played by Don Knotts. “J’accuse!”

“Naw, she ain’t the perp,” (and I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t a little bit suspicious of this COPS-ish lingo, which I later found out she got from some crazy episode of Star Trek where they travel back to the 20th century to save William Shatner’s career or something) “it’s him.”

And there, nursing a nasty leg shot and a fresh scar across his cheek, was Ana’s landlord and mine, “Slim” Tim the Welcher. Leave it to a man whose alternate rent program involves organ sales to pull something so gutless and reprehensible as cutting the lights.

Like some kinda meth-junked Scooby-Doo denouement, Ana gave me the lowdown: “See, Tim was trying to get us all out of the house so he could bring in a fresh stable of girls young enough to be fooled by his slick demeanor, so he’s been doing a little housework while we slept.”

“Tim, you turd! Ana, give me the gun, I’ll shoot him myself!”

Ana shooed me away like a fly, telling me to go help the dog-woman. “Yeah, she came back to tell me about Tim’s plan to get us all feuding. He gave her a whole long rant about how I was in the wrong and she should get even, and then she know something was rotten in Denmark.”

“Yeah, and that something is Tim! Just let me take one shot at him, I’ll even let him try to run! I can shoot the dust off a flea’s ass at a thousand paces! Bring it on, Tim!”

“But wait,” I think to myself, “how did Tim get those scars?” right about the same time that Fast Eddie Satan comes flying out of the trees in full battle regalia, screaming.

Well by the time things had come to a close, Ana had her lights up in time for her trip south, where she sold the gun for an ungodly amount of illegal chemicals and various delights which her and her man Justin split over the holidays, Tim dodged the whole racket by examining a sub-subclause in the lease, the dog-woman actually DID find a place where both her and her dog were understood…and me and Fast Eddie Satan, as usual, ended up in jail for reasons which are still pretty cloudy.

So, how’d you spend your holidays?
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #