Thu, 19 May 2005

The Magnifying Suit
DO NOT WEAR MAGNIFYING SUIT DURING ECLIPSES OR DURING PEAK DAYLIGHT HOURS AS YOU WILL COMBUST said the tag on the outside of the big-ass box sitting on the front porch, and like any such temptation to danger, Fast Eddie Satan couldn’t help but to sneak down out of his expartiate home in the Skyfish Treehouse and peek into the box’s contents. After being dropped a few times down the steps Ed discovered a tear in the box’s bottom, and not wanting the contents to get wet or infested with fire ants he decided it best to open it and keep it safe from harm. Having kept a low profile ever since being sprung from Catholic school and concluding the County Tour with the unfortunate show at Mark Clarise’s funeral, Ed had been itching to do something morally questionable, and with the contents of the box being like a giant permission slip to wronghood, it was as though he didn’t have a choice; this was something he had to do. He kicked his clothes up from the porch and through the window of the treehouse, climbing into the Magnifying Suit and limbering up to flee from authority figures when the parental Skyfishes arrived home from their jobs somewhere out in teh Industrial Grid to find filthy grubby Ed Satan wearing nothing but a giant pair of magnifying glasses like poster-signs. This officially closed any potential for his remainign at the Skyfish home, sending him out to the streets, and all streets lead to me (give me a map and I’ll prove it), which means Ed’s now living in my trunk. Which is why I can’t help you move your piano tonight.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Hope
Fast Eddie Satan’s dad used to be a bandleader; well, he used to lead two bartenders who kinda knew sax and a shoeshine boy who played harmonica at the Velvet Room of Jim Hagen’s Bar and Greyhound Station, Dekalb, Illinois. Sometimes Slim the Butcher would come in, and people in the audience (some winos, a couple conned by the doorman into thinking there were strippers involved in the show) would whisper “so what, is he a hitman or something?” and Slim would turn to ‘em, say “no, I’m the butcher” and sit in on drums for the band’s rendition of ‘house of the rising sun’ which went on, at times, all night. People hated that.

Fast Eddie Satan’s dad was one of the first people to buy a theremin and was convinced that it would be his means to success, the way bach thought the glass harmonica was going to take the orchestral world by storm. . thus, every song he ever wrote (as well as every cover the band performed) featured an extended theremin solo smack dab in the middle. This “exploration of new directions in music”, as he called it, resulted in hour after hour of…theremin soloing. You ever listen to a theremin for hours after hours? add to that the fact that after three or so hours of this, you realize it’s been a “reworking” of various Laurie Anderson songs when Slim and his junk butcher friends would murmur “this is the hand…the hand that takes…” and come kinda close, but not close enough, to a rhythm. And back to the theremin.

Fast Eddie Satan’s dad came THIS close to getting an NEA grant when Philip Glass, traveling through the bus station, heard the band and recommended them for the screening process. The band realized, at this point, the band didn’t have an official name, and this bugged the hell out of ‘em. After seven hours of heated debate, they dubbed themselves “The Velvet Room Necromancers with Slim The Butcher as A Side-Dish Of O.G. Funk”. NEA ate that shit up with a shovel. Alas, one of the waiters had his gun (always unloaded, like his hero barney fife) on him and set off an alarm on the way to an interview, and was so embarrassed he refused to go back, and Fast Eddie Satan’s dad, with the kind of quick thinking and lack of decorum his son would later be famous for, said “fuck ‘em, money would just corrupt our sound anyway” and threw the application away. They were back in the Velvet Room that night with a new sign behind ‘em-“The Crystal Blue Sounds of the Velvet Room Necromancers”-and did their Sun Ra medley. “interplanetray…interplanetary…interplanetary music…” murmured the band as Fast Eddie Satan said a silent prayer to Richard Moog and whoever looks over him and his trials.

As you may know if you were keeping an ear to the news around ‘82, it all went downhill from there — Fast Eddie Satan’s dad going into debt building “the Therechamber — the ultimate in perfect sound…”, Slim the Butcher getting blacklisted throughout Dekalb for comments about “the good old days in El Salvador”, the waiters getting better paying jobs at a Burger King across the street. But that night they were ON, if only once, and even now they still call each other, drunk, and talk about “getting the band back together”.

Fast Eddie Satan was three at the time. He tells me he’s sure he remembers that night. It’s pathetic, the way I can’t help but go digging through someone’s life looking for explanations and reasons, but maybe this time, maybe this time, I’m right, and that one night explains everything.

Maybe.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Day Ten
“The tour is over!” screamed Fast Eddie Satan, throwing his guitar at the amp (which sounded super-cool) and stomping off-stage. Merle hung out and looked out at the crowd of six, who were impatiently waiting for headliners Mark Clarise Is A Creep (apparently, from talking to these two orange-haired kids in green jumpsuits who looked like the Lucky Charms factory racing team, Mark Clarise really is a jerk, he likes to pee in peoples cars if they leave their windows down and give taffy to babies and stage seances in order to get chicks because apparently chicks dig seances but anyway) and eventually wandered offstage himself, leaving the drum machine belting out the same 5/7 beat for the next ten minutes, until one of the kids kicked a hole in the amp, which pretty much meant that the tour really was over, and having not found anything even kinda looking like the World’s Most Depressing Circus the boys wired home for cash and waited for good fortune to find them. Which, of course, it did.

“Local youth Mark Clarise was found dead earlier this evening after attempting to flee an irate mob and running into [sound lost to cheering and hollering by the audience and the six-piece MCIAC, who ended up playing for like five hours that night and probably even longer but Ana had showed up to get the boys and drive the twelve miles back home]”, said the television. “Dude, I think it’s time to start up a new band.” “Nuts to that, Ed. We’ve been broken up for not even half an hour yet, and besides, I think that lead singer dick peed on the drum machine.” “No drum machine, my man, we’re gonna have to get us a real drummer. And a new name.” MCIAC stumbled into a sing-a-long cover of “I Am The Walrus”, at which point Ed and Merle looked at each other, and the answer was obvious. All they needed now was a drummer.

“Hey! It’s the Megadeth Dude!”

The Megadeth Dude’s real name is Mitch, but not even his friends (well, his friend) calls him that anymore. Apparently, so the urban legend goes, Dave Mustaine had a coke-fueled vision that if he could get twelve people in twelve diffferent towns to constantly wear Megadeth shirts that the band’s street cred would just shoot through the roof. This was back in the “Killing Is My Business…” days, just after Dave was kicked out of Metallica, and so there wasn’t much money to go around, so the twelve lucky winners of Rip Magazine’s “Clean Dave Mustaine’s Kitchen” contest also got hooked up with free shirts and white promos of new Megadeth albums for life if they agreed to wear Megadeth t-shirts every day for the next ten years. They all agreed. Unfortunately, Mitch’s dad lost his job in Cincinatti and the family moved here, which is a considerably diminished population base in comparison. Metal not being quite the subculture here, the Megadeth Dude kinda stood out in a crowd, increasingly so as the years went on and he graduated high school and became something of an adult. The Megadeth Dude has a wife now, and they have a baby on the way, the worn and ratty “Peace Sells” shirt she wears to the market warping around the mound of her belly. Everybody knows the Megadeth Dude. But practically nobody, including Ed and Merle, knew he was a drummer.

“So let me see if I got this straight. Your kit consists of a tom, a cowbell, and a gong. And that’s it.”

“Well, it’s like I used to have a couple snares? But I figure why sound like everybody else when I can strip my setup down to the bare skeleton? And do something unique?”

“Um, okay. So you do realize that we tour, and so how do you expect to get that big-ass gong around?”

“Dude, that’s not even a concern because I built this frame for the top of my van that holds the bottom part and the actual gong I can fit in the back, right? I mean, I totally take responsibility, I’m the keeper of the gong, man.”

“Okay, but do you know anything besides “Highway Star”? I mean, you’re the Megadeth Dude, don’t you know “Wake Up Dead” or something?”

“Hey listen, man, fuck Megadeth anyway six ways from Sunday. You know how hard it is to get a job in a shirt like this?”

“Hey, sorry, dude. We’re gonna go talk it over and we’ll be right back.”

While the Megadeth Dude practiced his drumstick twirls, Ed and Merle went into the Rumpus Room and talked over their options.

“It’s either him, or Josef, or your mailman.”

“Hey, my mailman rocks, and you know it. You’re just against him because he likes the Beatles, which I think is taking the name thing just way too far.”

“It’s not just that, it’s also his whole hippie demeanor. We let him in the band, we’re gonna start having 20-minute “drums/space” sections where everybody noodles. You can forget that, man.”

“So we’re going with the Megadeth Dude? Are we gonna have to heavy everything up?”

“Just…just listen. He’s moldable. and once we convince him to get a real drum set like a human being he’ll be okay.”

“Ahhhh…fine. Fine. He can play this weekend, at Trent’s birthday party. We’ll see how he goes.”

“MEGADETH DUDE! YOU’RE IN THE BAND!” yelled Ed.

The Megadeth Dude replied “Kick Ass!” just before Merle’s dad came out to the garage to tell him to get his fucking gong off the lawn.

The birthday party:

“Creative differences.”

“Listen, I’m just sayin’…”

“You mean to stand there and look me in the eye and tell me we can’t do you the favor of playing your crappy backyard birthday party because you and Merle are having ‘creative differences’?”

“Listen, I’m trying to work around this, I really am, I think this is like something we can still make work and you know I want this to work, but…it’s my mom, man, you know how it is…”

“How what is, little man?”

“My mom is, she’ll be okay with maybe a couple cuss words, but, c’mon, ‘Coochie Hat’, that doesn’t even make sense!”

“I’ll have you know I wrote that song, motherfucker, and if you expect me to stand here and explain the inner meaning of each song before I ‘get’ to play it then you’re sorely mistaken, Trent.”

“Dude, okay, but then your crazy drummer guy does NOT have to take off his pants and run around the stage like a pervo during that guitar solo in ‘Invisible Sin Girls’ and you know that.”

“Okay, I’ll concede that point because you’re a friend and because your mom is supplying the beer and because it kinda is creepy. I’ll talk to him, we’ll work this out, okay? But don’t you EVER question my authority when I’m on stage, understood? I own that stage! I own every last damn inch of it!”

“Cool, man, we’re cool.”

“Solid. And if your sister bugs me even one more time I’m gonna sic the dogs on her ass. So you know.”

Everybody had to keep the noise down because it was the second Wednesday of the month, which meant Ed’s dad was hosting that week’s Meeting Of Loyal Evansdale Satanists And Librarians #281, which meant no rehearsal, techinically, only Ed had recently gotten the notion that Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays were ALWAYS rehearsal night even if the band couldn’t actually play that night, so it was Ed, Merle, the Megadeth Dude and Kali The Destroyer (whose real name was Kelly Moyahan, who was only over because her father was one of the MOLESAL’s upstairs trying to figure out the secret numerological meaning of the Dewey Decimal System), working on t-shirt designs.

“We can’t design the shirts until we know the name of the first album, dudes. That’s all there is to it. And that’s the reason why ‘Climbing The Rope Of Skinned Penises’ is such a killer name!”

“First, you and I and everybody here know that’s not gonna happen, Ed. Second, it does us no good to have t-shirts if nobody can wear ‘em because they’re too putrilicious. And C, that has nothing to do with our sound, and if we don’t give the people an idea of our sound, I mean, it’s just like we’re totally lost.”

“But the name has! to! rock!”

“ROOOOOOCK!”

“Dude, shut up, my dad’s gonna come down here.”

“I think you boys are all missing the essential element, in that none of you can actually draw anything, which seriously limits what you can even do graphically. Y’know?”

“Who votes Kelly The Consumer spends the rest of this rehearsal in the Closet of Silence?”

“Aye!”

“Aye!”

“C’mon, guys, stop being all like that. That’s a good point.”

“HA! That’s a draw, dingus, I’m staying!”

“I don’t know how anybody expects this band to last considering you don’t even, it’s like nobody even appreciates the, hell, I’ll say it, the vision I have, because—”

“Merle has a crush. I’m going to be ill.”

“Fuck you, man. That’s my amp you’re dicking with.”

“Kelly and Merley, sittin’ in a tree—”

“F! U! C! K! I—”

At which point what can best be described as a ‘ruckus’ erupted upstairs as MOLESAL discovered that 666 was the DDS code for ceramics, which led to an extensive argument/fight as to whether or not the Hobby Hutch could qualify as a “hidden temple of the horned beast”. At last report, the crucial album cover negotiations were still undecided, with Kali (who sits in ront of me in Chem) telling me there “might not even be an album jacket, even, becaus Merle is all like ‘Art compromises us at every fucking turn!’, right, so who even knows?”.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Day Eight
(written for Undergrad Writer’s Workshop, UofIowa spring 1996)

Wow, Fast Eddie Satan thought. I’m having a deja’ vu. When you have a deja’ vu, do you just go with it, or do you try to go against it? I mean, maybe it’s your subconscious trying to warn you of something bad that’s about to happen, some way the world is conspiring to see your downfall come forth right then, and man, you gotta know to listen when you get hints like that. Ed pondered, weighed issues, made use of game theory and set precedent, life experience and classic views, pro, con, pro, con, pro, all right, fuck it, I’ll fight it, he thought, waking up just in time to watch the first drop of rain hit him in the bridge of his nose. Obviously an omen. Shit. He heard the sound of a drill clawing through metal, looked up at his car, and saw his omen come to its fruition.

“MERLE!” he screamed, instantly jolted awake and running across the grass, barely able to see the parking lot in the pre-dawn bluepink haze, recognizing Merle Skyfish by the figure’s size and propensity for ignoble, self-defeating hijinx such as t his. “For God’s sake, man, what are you doing?”

Merle rammed the head of the drill through the hood of Ed’s possibly-stolen pea-green ‘73 Dart then brought the drill to a stop with a satisfied smile, wiping his brow and murmuring “Damn fine work, if I do say so myself. DAMN fine work. Morning, Mr. Satan, you catch some quality sleep?”

“The fuck, Merle?”

“‘Kay, now before you get all in a huff, let me explain, in layman’s terms, just what it is I’m doing on this beautiful if slightly damp morning. See, I’m about to give this car something it’s never dreamed it could possibly have…maximum performance…”, Merle intoning the last two words the same way Galahad would whisper of the Grail.

“YOU! You deliberately sabotaged our grand tour and search for the truth of the American Dream! JUDAS!”

“I won’t even dignify such an accusation with a replay. As I was saying, while you were catchin’ Z’s, I was hanging out over at Vendoland,” gesturing to a small wooden building just south of the larger rest-stop bathroom complex, where coffee and soda were available to the weary traveler of Highway 80 West, “talkin’ to a couple cholos over a few rounds of extra-strong coffees with everything, and they were tellin’ me I should trick this baby out some, y’know, do some engine mod., bore it out. So a bout an hour ago I snatched this drill from the back of that tow-truck at the end of the lot and got to work.”

“Right through the hood of the car, Mr. Badwrench?”

Merle sighs, shakes his head, says “See, an engine running at…maximum performance…dig, it’s gonna need additional ventilation. Just chill, Mr. Cynic, go wash yourself up and we’ll do breakfast, then take this baby out for a spin.”

Ed looked at what had been his pride and joy for the past week, his ride, the Satanmobile, and realized there was nothing left to be done; the only thing he could do was trust that even in this there was a divine reason and all would be made clear in the end. Amour fati. Ed walked back to his rapidly-dampening sleeping bag, which he grabbed and threw beneath the awning of the main building. Getting in out of the rain, Ed saw on the clock hung above the vast Iowa highway map that it was 5:17 AM and realized there was absolutely no way any good could come from a day like this.

Rest-stop bathrooms in the morning with all the windows closed smell like a combination of Lysol, crystal methedrine sweat and the cesspools of Jerusalem in high summer, which was a bit more than Ed could handle, already blinded by overflourescence and struck dumb by stall graffiti (I SHOT JFK, FREE NORTH AMERICA, KILL THE POOR, and Ed’s personal favorite, STRANGERS DIE EVERYDAY). Ed peeled off his grubbies, tried in vain to clean himself in the sink, and slipped into his freshly-pressed tux in a daze (“you got a suit this cool, you gotta wear it”); alas, he had left his frilly piratey Artist Formerly Known As Prince dress shirt at his parents house and had no choice but to crawl back into his “Sub Pop-It’s French for Fuck You” tee, which he had been wearing for nearly the entire road trip, going on eight days now, before he put on the jacket. Looking at his reflection in the stain-streeeaked mirror, Ed felt a need to say something, to crystalize the moment for whomever may be watching — Ed fully believed that spirit beings in other dimensions watched events on earth like television, switching from person to person the way we would channels, and it was wasting opportunity not to play it up. Ed liked to think he was doing fairly well in whatever ratings system these beings had. This piece of factual jetsam explains more about Ed than his school therapists ever could. “The rest stop. Christ. I can’t believe I’m still at the rest stop. I feel like Paul fucking Westerburg, and that’s no way to feel.”

“Could always be worse, y’know. You could be feeling like Robert Plant, and then you’d have to prance around and write songs about wizards and junk,” said a janitor who had crept in at some point during Ed’s soliloquy, spraying some kind of thick green liquid into the urinals. Ed was too wrapped up in said soliloquy to notice the janitor in question was Josef.

“That’s a point. My name’s Fast Eddie Satan. I’m in a band. Dickrattler and the Reverberators. We’re destined to a life of opening for bad local bands, and will probably die frustrated and bitter…hey, it’s you. Well what the fuck you know, Josef?”

“Jack, I know I used to be in a band, but our bassist found God and kept telling us we were evil and checking us for marks of the Devil when we weren’t looking. We were called Ska Hell, but we changed our name to The King Of Terrors right before we broke up. I’m mostly killing time until maybe I go back to school-”

“Go back to school? Why on earth would you want to do such a thing?”

“I had a good gig going there for a while — I made full-size skeletons of nonexistent animals, or I did, until I kinda stopped going to class. I was up for a couple grants, but the show I was gonna do got axed, so now I’d have to private-fund it, and fuck that, thus…doesn’t matter, I’ll probably be shot to death by a crack-addled trucker. Pleased to make your acquaintence. Now, If you’ll excuse me, I gotta swab down the sinks, and I’d hate to stain that sweet tux jacket.”

Ed heard another nightmarish sound come from the car, and decided morning primping time was over. The sun had come up enough by the time he reached the car to see thick black oil pouring across the cement, pooling in the gutter.

“Merle, Merle, Merle. When will you ever learn, boy-oh?”

Merle looked disgustedly at the car, muttered something about “poorly-designed cylinders, faulty o-rings and shoddy Detroit workmanship” and returned the drill to the back of the tow truck without waking the snoozing mechanic inside.

“Enough talking, Merle. Time for breakfast.”

The back seat of the Dart looked like a stockroom at Willy Wonka Inc. The boys had two pounds of Skittles, half a grocery sack of multicolored gumballs, various flavors of Pez, seventy-five Atomic fireballs, and a whole galaxy of Sprees, SweeTarts, and a couple rolls of those crappy Smartees that were always the last thing you ate from your Halloween candy stash (excepting apples and, if you lived in Merle’s neighborhood, potatoes a nasty punk couple gave every year). Also, there was Pixie Stix, Hot Tamales, Super Hot Tamales, Wasabi and Napalm Hot Tamales, various chocolate delights from across mid-Europe, and some kinda purple Japanese fizzy thing both Ed and Merle were afraid to try. Being an already stressful morning, it was best to stick with the classics, and besides, nothing brings old friends together like a solid morning of Pixie-Stix.

“Breakfast of champions,” nodded Merle.

“Best way to start the day,” concurred Ed.

Brothers-in-arms once more, Merle started in on damage control as far as the car experiment went. “We’re going to have to rely on High Science. Fortunately, I still have my lab coat, but I’m not gonna put it on unless you promise to respect my sci entific acumen. Deal?”

Ed, wanting how such utter irresponsibility could possibly be rationalized, agreeed.

“Okay, Merle. Hit me with the diagnosis.”

“See here, Ed, where this tube got cut? This should be connected over there, to the refibulator, which gets oil up here in the overcam.”

“You don’t say. The overcam.”

“Right-o. But due to the damage to the Liston pistons, and irreparable trauma sustained to the Bachman-Turner overdrive, I’m going to have to give a diagnosis of Code 23…”

“Which is your way of saying?”

“…the only cure for which, of course, is death. A valiant effort on my part was not sufficient to save the patient, and though I am saddened by its loss, I find myself totally unresponsible for the end result. Y’know, what this coat realy needs is some gold lame’.”

“So you drilled a hole straight into the pistons, which thus means they won’t hold any pressure, which means the car will not move. So we’re fucked. And you’re saying this isn’t your fault.”

“See, I didn’t take into considerating the fact that pistons on all ‘73 Dogde Darts are notoriously unstable and thus could not take the strain of the process, is the thing. Basically.”

This must be the fruition of my omen, Ed thought.

“Hey, Merle?”

“Yup?”

“When you’re having a deja’ vu, should you just ride it out and go with it or should you fight it?”

“You go with it, man. Fighting a deja’ vu, that’s fighting destiny, man, that’s crazy talk.”

How utterly typical. Ed looked up at the sky and watched as the rain stopped.

“Y’know, Iowa has some kick-ass clouds. Check it out.”

“Totally. That’s God’s apology for making people live here.”

While the boys sat on the picnic table and tried to break clouds with nothing more than their thoughts, a large garbage truck pulled into the stop, leaving a trail of dead insects in its wake. Josef and James, the other rest stop attendee (“Hey Bud, my name’s James, but the ladies like to call me Cowboy”), had begun yelling and throwing empties at the truck until it backed out (and, in the process, waking everyone still asleep in their cars with the Truck Backing Up Hell-Noise, which apparently triggers some kind of neural response making sleep impossible) and left the area.

“Wassup?” Ed yelled from across the grass. “Something goin’ down? Y’all need to bring in some muscle?”

“Nah,” said Josef. “That’s just Emerson. That truck’s fulla biohazardous waste, that’s what those big symbols on the side of the truck stood for. Used to work fro a freelance waste removal agency until EPA busted ‘em for breaking code, wired out to all the disposal sites not to accept dumping from ‘em anymore. The removal place basically turned everything over to the government and filed chapter 11, ‘cept Emerson, see, he sold the radio out of his truck a couple weeks before that, so he’s been driving around from site to site, wondering why no one will accept his load.”

“How long’s that been going on?”

“What, James, half a year?”

“Sheeeet, no,” James drawled. “Couple years, more likely. All them trucks are faulty, see, that waste’s been seeping into the cab, I bet. Emerson’s gone loco. When I was truckin’, guys’d get off the road and say they saw a truck comin’ down the road with some kinda fog coming off it, like death. Horse don’t get much paler than that, I tell ya.”

“F’real?” Ed asked.

The janitors looked at each other, looked at Ed, and started to laugh.

“Shit, no. Emerson’s a Tom, he likes watching guys piss. Highway Patrol says we can mace him if he steps in here. Man, James, sucker born every second these days. I weep for the future of America.”

“It’s them schools. They should pull those Civic Duty and Consumer Responsibility classes and start teaching How Not To Be A Clueless Dufus instead. Got the first student right over there.”

The janitors walked to the back office, giggling, at which point Ed decided he’d had about enough of hanging out at the rest stop.

“Let’s find us a gun and get the fuck out of here. It’s my prognosis we have to give the Dart a proper send-off by pumping hot lead right into the engine block before we can leave it to shrug off its mortal coil.”

“I think we’ve found a suitable send-off. You get all the shit out of the car in case it blows up, which could happen, and I’ll call my sis quick and get some solid travelling advise.”

“Tell her I said hi, and stuff. And that I’ve become, like, cooler since I’ve gone out on the road, like I’ve found my manhood, or something.”

Merle giggled and almost said “Ed, you couldn’t find your manhood with a flashlight, both hands and an anatomically correct doll”, but Ed gets this weird look in his eyes when he talks about Ana, and Merle, ever the diplomat, decided to leave it alone. Thus, while Ed unpacked the loot — a pile of dirty clothes, the candy stash, Ed’s Gibson and bag of effects pedals, Merle’s bass and Peavey amp, Larry The Drum Machine (Age five months, Aquarius, turn-ons: annoying hand-clap noises not seen since the days of Devo, which Larry takes great delight in irrythmically adding during shows ever since Ed stepped on him in the midst of wacky stage antics), a stack of band flyers with gig times and locations left blank, and a map showing the last-known locations of The World’s Most Depressing Circus, which Fast Eddie Satan added another red X to, Merle found a semi-clean phone and called Ana.

Ana used to be in a few bands, one of which — Buddy Holly’s Drummer — actually got some airplay and a write-up in minimumrock&roll, so when they boys need technical advice, they go to her, adn with Ed having a thing for her there’s that weird bargaining leverage thing going on, which Merle made use of fairly often. Merle punched 1-800-FUCK-ATT into the phone pad, punched in Ana’s number, listened to her machine pick up (to the sound of Masonna’s japanese noise masterpiece (and Donovan cover) “Wear Your Love Like Heaven”), began leaving a message and heard Ana, call-screening, pick up.

“Heya, Merley-Merle, wassup?”

“Jack. Jack fucking nothing. Ed and I are stranded at the I-80 Victor West rest stop, where we’re about to pop a cap in our ride. Other than that, just out looking for The Great American Dream, or something, I guess.”

“So life on the road kinda sucks, then.”

“Oh Lord, Ana. Totally. You don’t even know.”

“I saw you guys opened at the Resist Destroy Kill benefit, you still there for the riot?”

“Okay. So I knew there was something wrong with a benefit concert for Amish Separatists with a name like that, and finding out it was in The Boathouse didn’t settle my mind any, but Ed kept sayin’ how it was gonna be such great exposure, how this was gonna be the cornerstone of the entire tour, and how if we played we didn’t have to pay cover. So we went on, and it was cool, I mean, they had this insane amp set-up, it was like from Motorhead or something, so we were LOUD, and I’m thinking this was a good idea. Then Urine Therapy played, and they sucked, like always. Then Cthulhu’s Fishermen played, right? The Angriest Polka Band of All Time? And they start the set with a cover of John Zorn’s ‘Krystalnacht’, so it’s already ugly, and this skin starts Seig Heiling the band from one of the pits and the lead singer jumps into the crowd and starts bashing the guy with his accordion and the band just keeps playing, and then they did “Blood in the Streets Polka”, and people are screaming and throwing bottles and shit, so they get off after about 40 minutes and we’re thinking the worst is over…”

“Right, I heard right after that Thong Miao started playing…”

“And they were cool, Ana, I mean…there’s three of ‘em, three small Vietnamese women, not much older than us, but they were just INSANE, they started with ‘A Contract On America’ and the whole crowd goes nuts, the bouncer guys start making a wall between the band and the crowd but the band just kept building and building and screaming, man, could they scream, and then somebody jumps up and tries to mace a bouncer who’s been punching kids all night and he ducks and the lead singer gets maced instead, so she pulls a Sid Vicious and clubs the guy with her guitar and the whole place just lost it, people were throwing chairs, the cops came and because Miao was playing tapes of like warfare samples nobody noticed until they rushed the place, tear gas and shit, so I lose Ed in the hubbub and I look up and there’s the lead singer, the one who clubbed the guy, and she smiles and looks at me and says ‘Now the real show begins’ and I start freaking out, man, she pulls out a MACHETTE and dives into the audience and as I’m running for the door I hear some frat guy yell ‘My fingers! SOMEBODY HELP ME FIND MY FINGERS!’ and I got the fuck out of the Boathouse.”

“Shit, Merle. What happened to Ed?”

“Ah, he hooked up with some girls who figured since the show was in Cedar Falls that House was gonna play and apparently drove out to that graveyard by UNI and did bong hits all night. I found him the next day at Cup ‘o Joe looking like something had digested and passed him. Moron. He says hi, by the way, and told me specifically not to tell you he’s got a crush on you.”

Ana laughs, “Like that’s news or something…you know the Amish refused the money because it was ‘tainted by violence’ and it ended up going to some public service program to rehabilitate ex-Wehrmacht troops, ‘Deposed Nazis In Hiding For A Kindler And Gentler God’ or something, and I hear there’s a ban on shows at the Boathouse now.”

“Go fucking figure. I’m convinced Cedar Falls is one of the seven gateways to hell. How’s life in Analand?”

“Uh…classes good, work sucks, music’s okay. Blah blah blah, same old, you know this story, Merle.”

“Hey, here’s today’s hypothetical question, by the way: When you were touring and the van broke down, how’d you get around?”

“Depended on the kindness of strangers. We were driving to Minneapolis to open for Scratch Acid, believe it or not, and the van died out on I-35, fucking Nowheresville, on what we later found out was the coldest night of the year. So it’s going on an hour and we pretty much figure we’re not long for this earth when a big ol’ bus pulls over and we get in. Alas, they were Chicago Suburb Hippies.”

“Good Lord. And you rode with such people?”

“These were desperate times, Merle, and desperate measures were called for. We had to sit and discuss the inner meanings of Phish songs for a couple hours, but all things considered, we got out fairly untainted.”

“I don’t think we’re gonna find any hippies of any kind out here at the stop.”

“You’ll find somebody, I mean, the people are already stopped there and it’s a warm summer day and two cutey-pie lil’ kids like yourselves are bound to get rides quick. Besides, doesn’t Ed have a, like, preternatural knack for things like that?”

“Normally, but he’s all in a huff because he thinks I’m deliberately sabotaging the trip, and you know how he gets when he’s grumpy… Forsake the car, then?”

“Yep. leave it be. Wait, I got a fortune cookie here, just a sec…okay, it says ‘All your troubles are behind you. Trust instinct. Go with destiny.’ You’re set, bro.”

“Wonderful. I’ll give you a ring when we reach civilization.”

“Godspeed, Merley. Keep sane. And if you get the chance, I’d suggest Crotch Soup. Sounds like you boys could use it.”

Merle hung up, listened to the cicadas in the trees and ruminated on Ana’s suggestion until he saw Ed in heated conversation with James.

“Waddaya MEAN, the candy machine is broken?”

“I’m tellin’ ya, we can’t fix it, we can’t do squat. They’re run by the Iowa Department of the Blind, the machines at all the rest stops in the state are run by them, and any they can fix ‘em.”

“So why the fuck haven’t they come out here yet?”

James started giggling, again, and said “They’re trying, mi amigo, they’re trying…”

“You dipshit! Where’s the ‘warm, helpful service’ the sign on the map promises…Merle! C’mere and help me give Cowboy here some warm, helpful service!”

“Forget it. We’ve got enough candy here, all we need is some soda, and we’ll ponder the truth, Ana’s advice and the Great American Dream over drinks.”

“Que?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures, my friend. It’s time for Crotch Soup.”

Ed grudgingly decided to table his beef with James and pulled out three bucks in change he found while cleaning out the back seat, investing in Dr. Pepper, the ideal base for Crotch Soup — open Dr. Pepper, add Skittles (gruesome, perhaps, but necessary), add Pixie Stix dust, use empty Pixie Stix as straws, shake well, garnish with Nutella and enjoy. This feat of sucrotic and highly-caffeinated alchemy utterly horrified and disgusted all passerby unfortunate to pay witness to the spectacle…all, that is, except James.

“Y’all mind if I take a hit off yer drink?”

“Fuck off and die! Then fuck off in the afterlife! And then, if it’s possible, die again!”

“Listen, Bud, I’m real sorry for laughin’ at ya all day, I’m just funnin’, ain’t nothin’ personal…I promise not to josh with ya no more. Truce?”

“Ah…I s’pose. Go for it, dude.”

Merle added, in an attempt to be helpful, “But you probably wanna sit down first.”

“Sheeet, boys, I done shit that’d make yer kid-size sacs shrivel up and fall off, man, when I was truckin’, I was smokin’ ice all day every day, fat chunks of ice 24-7, then when I was doin’ professional witness work-”

“Professional witness?”

“Yeah, back a few years ago there used to be these outfits, Jourgensen Witness Agency, and in like your bigger cities you could get work there, what’d you do is go in about ten PM, put on a big orange jumper with JWA on the back, get dropped off the bus and stand around high-crime areas waiting for shit to go down, then if you see it and testify in court the victim’s family or local cops pay high-price to JWA, I’d get six percent commission and min. wage, was a sweet gig until i got a couple real interesting holes put in my back one night, but anyway so’s i was working out in Japanima, we called it, girl I know come up, say ‘Ey, Cowboy, gweilo, wan’ shabu-shabu?’ and even on the job I was doin’ it, shit, me and Josef been up all morning on coffee and ephedrine, smokin’ king-hell Humboldt County bud, man, tell me to sit down, shit—”

“Okay, just shut the fuck up and take a drink already.”

James takes a pull, laughs, and goes hypoglycemic in about as much time as it takes for the boys to scatter from beneath his falling body. Merle tries to flip him over and feels something lumpy in James’ pants.

“Dig. Our friend James is packin’.”

Sure enough, Ed pulled up the mandatory white short-sleeve dress shirt and there, shoved into the back of his khakis, James had the god-damn biggest gun either of them had ever seen.

“Check it, Merle. Desert Eagle. In case you need to stop a herd of rabid rhinos, or somethin’.”

“This’ll do fine, just fine. You’ll be remembered in song and fable, James.”

Still rushing on the Soup buzz, the boys walk to the car, pour the remaining Dr. Pepper over the hood of the Dart and pay their last respects:

“In his book America, Jean Baudrillard wrote ‘Drive ten thousand miles across America and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together.’ Certainly, through the aid of this car before us, we have learned a great many things we would never have without going out on the road.”

“We learned that everyone in this fucking country was, at some point, in a band.”

“We learned that Larry The Drum Machine gets temperamental when you spill pop on him.”

“We learned that opening for the Who’s ‘Pete’s Not Dead’ tour was the biggest mistake of our lives, so far.”

“And, now, we learn the meaning of loss. Selah.”

“Selah.”

Ed pulls out the gun from beneath his shirt. The morning picknickers grow quiet and watch.

“Guess it’s time to do it.”

Along the dashboard of the Dart, right above the seatbelt light, was a light whose function was never quite clear to either Ed or Merle. The car’s previous owner called it the Swindle-Meter because it went on just before something really bad was about to happen. For the first time since Ed “acquired” the Dart, the Swindle-Meter blinked on, a bright HAL-like red.

Ed pulled the trigger. The recoil knocked him back onto the grass, sending the gun up and out of his hands, which had gone completely numb from the blast.

The Swindle-Meter faded, blinked, and went out forever.

The entire rest stop was silent.

“So,” said Fast Eddie Satan, looking upside-down at a lawn full of picknickers, “anyone think they could give us a ride into town?”
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

day two
“GO! GOGOGOGOGOGO!”

Fast Eddie Satan proved his surname by bolting across the street, dodging traffic which blocked the view from the car of Raymond Oates, lying in a heap, absolutely dazed by the impact of something bulky and screaming descending from the sky like a dying angel. Mike Danielson varied between asking Ray if he was okay and screaming panicked obscenities at no one in particular, the remaining El Duce Burrito patrons milling about and looking for possible suspects, and Raymond lay on the ground, staring at clouds, and giggling uncontrollably, quietly.

Ed hopped into the open passenger door, leaping into the hands of Doug and Ana, pulling the door closed behind him as the car pulled a sickening left onto Griffin Street.

“The fuck was that about, boys?” asks Josef, the driver, eyeing for police and possible vehicular obstacles.

“We weren’t happy with our service, and the customer is always right,” answered Doug, curled defensively around the project to prevent breakage and insect release.

Ana, who has learned from her day job at Rent and Putt Video and Extreme Miniature Golf Multiplex that the customer is always wrong, repositions herself in order to let Merle climb up into the front seat, which with her being seated friendly- close to Ed, sends him into puppy-crush synapse-collapse and effectively removes him from the conversation. Also in absentia is Jackson, who looks around at the others and stares out the window, trying to come to terms with his surroundings. Josef, on the other hand, is pretty much in high-speed pursuit mode, requiring constant reminders fom the passengers to slow the fuck down. By the time they reach the interstate (the most effective means of cross-town travel), everybody’s settled enough to attempt civilized conversation, or at least everybody except Ed, whose swaggering bravado has imploded entirely.

“You’re quite the quiet one today, Mr. Satan,” Ana comments.

Ed’s something of a fixture at the Skyfish household, and though Merle’s filled with stories of his harebrained hijinx, Ana’s never seen him anything but out-and-out shy.

“Yeah. I s’pose.”

“You regularly drop off rooftops on people?”

“Not regularly, no.”

The car is filled with the sound of the defroster, the low hum of AM depression music, and Jackson’s bronchitis-like chest rattle. Merle rolls his eyes and sighs, Doug stares emptily out the window, and Josef sings under his breath along with a Steve Earle song playing in his head.

“So what’s your deal, anyway, Ed?”

“Huh?”

“For example, like, what’s with Fast Eddie Satan?”

“That’s not my fault. That’s my parent’s doing. My whole life up until now has been a prolonged attempt to live up to the reckless streetwise sensibilities such a name implies. I’d rather be getting into my adolescent creepy side right now, but no, I have to pay the price of my stupid dad’s lipping off.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“So anyway right after my dad got out of the navy and right before he totalled the GTO (long story, another time) he was hanging out in Jim’s, a local Waterloo down-by-the-Cedar bar, some Saturday night playing a drunken game of what probably started out as darts but by this time had degenerated into a game of Stick Larry In The Ass, which was a Jim’s tradition ever since Larry Heinus, yuppie and satanic chiropractor made it “his weekend place”. So in walks this guy who has that used to be a biker but sobered up and is doing AA and making god’s eyes and bad hippie art with his girlfriend to sell at Sunday morning flea markets but tonight he’s gonna drink every last motherfucker in the place beneath the floorboards look to him, and so that’s no big deal ‘cept there’s a flock of waitresses from over at the local Bishop’s giggling and passing around some piece of paper and Big Biker Motherfucker goes over and looks at the paper like there’s nothing funny at all and so my dad, who’s nothing if not a gentleman, he’s been drinking like everclear/cuervo/jaegermeister/purple kool-aid mixers since about eleven that morning and thus feeling a bit cocky, he staggers up to BBMF and tells him to go peddle his apples on the other side of the street and BBMF looks my dad straight in the eye, the exact phrase my dad uses when he tells this story, and he tells my dad “Man, don’t you know who I am, sailor- boy?” — see, pops still had his crew-cut and his big o1’ heavy longshoreman’s coat which he ended up giving to my cousin brian even though I had dibs on it since I was, like, six, I mean, it’s just—”

“Hey, Ed? Does this little story of yours have a point?”

“So anyway my uncle Kenny comes up beside my dad and he spits out ‘What makes you think we give two red shits who you are?’ and BBMF bellows out ‘Man, I’m Satan, you dumbfucks! The king of all evil hisself!’ and there isn’t a person there who thinks this guy is kidding, I mean everybody in the place is convinced this is Satan, no shit, who apparently has nothing better to do than try to pick up waitresses in some midwest straight-from-boilermakers ‘you want an umbrella in your drink? man, you’re gonna have your balls in your drink if you don’t shut your mouth’ hayseed bar, maybe he’s a local, who knows. So my dad, see, he looks the Prince of Darkness straight in the eye and says ‘Listen, Satan, how’s about you and me step outside.’”

“Yah-huh, sure thing, Ed, I’m buying this.”

“See now, I’ll admit my dad isn’t the brightest guy, even for a bandleader, but common logic which even he possesses would pretty much hold that you’d have to be dumber than Josef up there—”

“You wanna walk?”

“—to go fighting Satan, I mean he’s got unholy powers and he’s got legions of demons and arch-demons and all kindsa ghastly Dante’ shit to back him up and plus he cheats. But when it comes down to a mono e mono bare-knuckle streetfight, Satan ain’t really no Jackie Chan, hell, he ain’t even no Chow Yun Fat. Satan generally doesn’t have to fight for himself and thus is out of practice and he’d had a few shots before hassling the waitresses and unlike my dad, whose tooth-and-claw reflexes only grew sharper with alcohol, Satan got kinda sloppy while intoxicated and left himself open to a few really wicked kidney- punches. So they’re out there in the back parking lot mixing it up and the cops show up with a priest in tow; apparently they’ve had this happen quite a bit lately, and so Father Martin goes into his exorcism spiel and Satan, who’s a fucking ham apparently, still as vain as before the fall, he does the full b-grade Jack Chick bit and points at my dad, saying ‘I’ll get you but bad, mister sailor hot-rod boy!’ and disappears in a cloud of sulphur and toads. So one of the waitresses comes out and starts talking to my dad, and they hit it off, and they got hitched, and you don’t need to be Paul Harvey to know the rest of the story.”

“You still haven’t explained the name thing, though.”

“So they have a child, and tat child is me, and they go to put his name on the birth certificate, and already written is Fast Eddie Satan, and so they get a new certificate and it’s got the same thing, they try for days and days but no dice, and eventually they give up and accept the sacrifice of their first-born, I guess. For an eternal curse, though, it’s not bad, I kinda like it, it’s a hoot giving teachers shit for not believing that’s my name.”

Only the thing is no teacher is really that suprised by any weird name anymore, it’s become rather standard for young people to change their names in a fit of adolescent rebellion; it started with the Bosnian immigrant youth whose families encouraged them to change their names in order to better fit into society; however, most of them being hip-hop b-kids, they adopted names like “Dru Malik J”, “West Side Ren”, or like El Duce Burrito night shift manager, “King D”. Local suburb kids picked up on this and began naming themselves after speed- metal and neo-goth frontmen; at Waterloo West a few years back, there were over a dozen Marilyn Mansons. Thus, few teachers would be suprised by something as benign as Fast Eddie Satan, compared to classmates like Betsy Wetsy and The Almighty, and so Ed generally had to find more abrubt ways to disrupt class and live up to his birth-given rep.

“You’re a strange one, Mr. Satan.”

“Maybe, I dunno, I suppose I — hey, there’s Lou’s! STOP THE CAR THIS INSTANT!”

The car lurched to a stop right in front of Lou’s Anti-Social Noise Hut, sending equipment, insects, and bodies flying toward the front seat, which resulted in a forced evacuation of the car until all foreign elements had been shooed away.

“So, that other kid’s your brother, huh?” asked Jackson, awake from his stupor thanks to the high-velocity stop.

“Yeah,” said Ana, “that he is. Merley’s okay, he’s just got weird friends, I guess.”

“Unlike his older sister, of course,” half-mumbled Josef, looking over his shoulder to check for traffic.

“Indeed indeed, praise be.”
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #

Day One
“Ed, I think it’s time we had a talk.”

Fast Eddie Satan unplugged his Fender Mustang and walked into the kitchen, so distracted by the parental intrusion of his newly reformed band’s rehearsal he forgot to do the Eddie Swagger past the small throng of prepubescent girls drinking kool-aid and whispering just on the other side of the backyard fence. Ed’s father, getting dressed in gray sweats and store- fresh cross-trainers, was getting ready for the night’s La Lobo De la Luna run, a neighborhood gathering of mid-life crisis- clenched yupscale fathers who ran through the neighborhood at top speed from one Miata to another (each night’s loser was left to walk home in shame and sweat), cutting through backyards and howling. Ed’s father had been working out for the past few weeks, tired of constantly having to walk home beneath the stares of homeowners wondering what the god-awful racket was about, and was too busy to notice Ed’s enterance, still entertaining visions of watching coworker and general nuisance Lawrence Cankle fade to nothing in the taillight glare whilst he and his fellow thirtyesque wolf brothers howled joyously into the suburban night. Ed’s mother, on the other hand, had been preparing to talk to her oldest boy all afternoon and, after careful deliberation and calls to in-the-know friends, decided to cut right to the quick.

“Ed, you’re going to have to move into the garage. We can set you up a little room back behind the work bench where you can play with your little friends, and we’ll help you move, but there’s no other way, you obviously can’t share a room with your siblings, and we need your room for the baaaaaaaabeeeeeee…”, at which point her crisp tones softened into a gelatinous goo of motherly affection, staring down into the eyes of the little miracle in her lap.

“What?”

“Try to have your stuff out by Friday — we’re going to start decorating the baaaaaabeeeeeee’s room by tomorrow, oh yes we are, oh wes, oh wes oh wes ohwesweswes”, coming in low and hovering over the child, finally touching down to make fatty noises by blowing on the baby’s belly.

“What?”

Ed’s mother no longer had ears for him anymore, and his father, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet in anticipation, was too far away to be of any negotiational help.

Ed stared down at his shoes, trying to come up with a crushing retort, and realized he hadn’t changed out of his Loop t-shirt and dirt-stained jeans in days. He then looked at the baby (who he was convinced hadn’t yet been named; he had only heard it referred to as “the baaaaaaybeeeeee” since its arrival two months ago), which was cute in the way all babies born without massive skin anomalies are cute, soft, no rigid features, cooing. No contest.

Ed marched back to the makeshift stage (two picnic tables pushed together with a severe danger of the speakers falling off the back and into the garden) where his band, consisting of Merle Skyfish and Larry The Drum Machine, was talking to the neighborgirls about the deeper significance of songs like “Snitches Get Stitches”, “Hand Check” and “I Hate Math”. Merle barely had time to pick up his bass and plug Larry in before Ed hollered “One! Two! One Two FUCK YOU!” and tore into a truly vicious cover of “Super Trooper”, which was a mess, but Ed felt better, and it scared the girls away.

Later, after having the amp cord pulled in order to free up an outlet for the bug zapper, Merle tried to round up plans for the rest of the afternoon.

“Hey, Ed, you wanna come over to the hacienda? I made a tape of John Woo movies with all the boring talking and plot garbage taken out. Two solid hours of supreme gunfight action, mui amigo…”

Normally Ed would have followed Merle back to his house without asking, if only for the chance to be around his older sister Ana, who tends to make Ed retarded in the head with love whenever she’s around. On this day, however, Ed shifted into mythic loner mode and said “Naw, I gotta go find Doug and talk with him about this stupid room thing, see if he has any leverage with the folks.”

“I’ll tag along, then, North Playgrounds’s right on the way, I got nothing better to do.”

Ed’s younger brother Doug spent his post-school afternoons sitting in his special swing at North Playground, where he tossed stones into mud puddles and brought insects back from the dead. This was a trick his grandfather taught him involving breath currents and stroking horizontally along the thorax with a thumbnail, anyone could do it, but the children who frequented the playground were convinced Doug had special powers and would pay him perform insect resurrections one more time. Doug kept a shoebox with him whenever he went to the playground where he deposited the insects he could not revive. For his term project in Natural Sciences, Doug’s teacher had assigned each child a box lined with cotton, pins, tweezers, and a bottle which the students were to saturate with fingernail polish remover in order to enclose and exterminate at least five insects of various kinds, which were to be carded and identified. Doug had thrown away the cotton-lined box and built tiny crucifixes for each of the insects he could not bring back, placing them by stickpins into a small diorama he had built from model train equipment, a toy-model landscape of blood and sand where, on the top of the tallest dune, stood the killing jar. The project was laid out before Doug on the benches kids normally set up as launching ledges to facilitate higher swing trajectories, but the swingset regulars and Doug’s usual audience had been bad-vibed away by the playland Golgotha.

“Dougie,” Ed said, over Doug’s shoulder, “that praying mantis is upside down.”

“Right. That’s Saint Peter.

“So this is the big N.S. project, huh. Mendehlsonn will, man, he’ll love this. This is some heavy beaurocratic heat, chief.”

“It’s a witch-hunt. If they don’t get me for this, it’ll just be something else. I might as well make most of my potential now, and if anyone asks, I’ll just feed ‘em some line about representations of Marx’s hive theory.”

“The fuck you know about Marx?”

“Nothing. Which is sufficient for my defense.”

Merle, over the other shoulder, asked “Hey Doug, how is it you couldn’t bring any of these ones back? What’s the difference?”

“I’m going to bring them back. That’s the best part.”

Ed and Merle began to understand the vibe zone that had collected around the swingset, and dwelt on that in silence until Doug spoke up.

“Had a guy come up today, smelled like a cop, wore cop aftershave. Asked me what I was doing. Told him I was working on some school junk. He told me maybe I should take my project somewhere else. I told him how a few days ago this girl, I didn’t really know her, stepped up to me with a small white garbage bag and a handful of change. She told me her momma kitty just gave birth to a while litter of baby kitties, only they were all dead, but the momma kitty kept watch over them and wouldn’t let this girl’s dad get rid of them. The momma kitty would hiss and spit and make unnatural noises; the momma kitty was obviously really sick, and the humane society had to come out and take the momma kitty away. But so later this girl climbed out of her window and down to the street and got all the baby kitties out of the garbage, because she knew just like the momma kitty knew that they weren’t really dead, it just took some time, and this girl had heard that I could bring things back to life, and even though kitties are different than bugs she was sure these just needed a little shove and they’d be okay.

“The guy who was probably a cop stood there and looked just like you guys look now. And after a while, he went away.”

“Wow, Dougie.”

“So mom throw you out yet?”

“You know about that?”

“Yeah, she told us to be super-nice to you today because it was going to be hard on you to move out of your room. What you gonna do?”

“I’m thinking of moving into Merle’s treehouse, though I haven’t asked him yet.”

“Yeah,” Merle mumbled, “my folks, they would dig on that.”

“Anyway, we were heading out to get some dinner. Dad’s out wolfing again and Mom’s gonna make some kinda casserole surprise thing. You wanna come along?”

Dougie started putting away his project, climbed up out of his funk and smiled.

“Yeah. Let’s get some Mexican.”

“Hello, this is El Duce Bur— oh, for fuck’s sake, what do you guys want?”

Ed’s family had once made the unfortunate decision to grab a Sunday Family Meal at El Duce Burrito (to knowledge, the only Italian-Mex restaurant in the States, named after an obscure rarely-seen photograph of the recently deceased Benito Mussolini, fresh from hanging upside-down from a meathook, rolled up in a carpet for storage before burial), where they ordered a Family- Size Holy Frijole’ Special and all suffered stomach cramps so wretched the children laid in the grass in front of the restaurant and moaned until shooed away by teenage waiter Mike “Sweet Willy Sunshine” Danielson — master of the sour cream gun, Camaro owner, rock and roll warrior, and target of Ed and Doug’s undying vengeance. “What do we want? Hey Ed, what do we want?”

“I’ll tell you what we want, we want our GOD-DAMN MONEY BACK!”

“Listen, okay, first, I’ll call the cops on you guys if you don’t get going right now, and second, you can’t order from the drive-through line unless you have a car, okay?”

“YOUR FOOD GAVE US CRAMPS, MIKE!”

“AND THE RUNS! AND PROBABLY CANCER!”

“PTOMAINE, DYSENTERY AND PEPTIC ULCERS!”

“DOUGIE HERE IS GOING BLIND DUE TO YOUR GASTROINTESTINAL TERRORISM!”

“INTERNAL BLEEDING! AND POSSIBLY SYPHILIS! RIGHT, MERLE?”

While the brothers had been haranguing Mike, Merle had been walking from car to car in the slowly-increasing line behind them and telling them nauseating stories of what Employee-of- the-month Danielson did with his hands during his three fifteen- minute breaks. “YOU HEARD THE MAN,” Merle bellowed, “THE WRATH OF GOD IS A COOL BREEZE COMPARED TO THE WHIRLWIND YOU HAVE REAPED, SON!”

“NOT ONLY THAT, BUT—”

At which point El Duce Burrito owner and Nautilus abuser Raymond Oates Jr. charged out the side doors and scanned the parking lot, searching for the scourge of all chain-restaurant owners, Underage Belligerent Loiterers. Normally the boys would have no problem with a speedy getaway to the relative asylum of any of the restaurants in the area, who all look on these ongoing antics as clean-natured fun and market softening, but with Doug weighed down with the project and with Merle lugging around the bass and a backpack full of patch cords and effects pedals, it was up to Ed to provide escape clearance via distraction. The best way to do this, as always, was mass confusion.

“SOD-O-MY!” screamed Ed, scurrying via dumpster to relative safety on the roof of the building. “SODOMY! SODOMY! SODOMY!”

Raymond rushed to the side of the dumpster, effectively cutting Ed off from his only means of escape. This is a game the two of them had played before; in the past, Ed knew better than to place himself in a corner, and Raymond stood still, smiling, waiting for Ed to concede, which he might have been forced to do, had he not seen out of the corner of his eye Merle and Doug getting into a car out in front of Eat, a vast beast of a car, a car which contained Ana, and Ana’s creepy pseudo- boyfriend Josef, and some other guy. Ed looked at the car, and then at Raymond, then at the El Duce Burrito sign which stood just past him. Maybe, Ed thought, if I did this just right, if I timed it perfectly, I could make this work.

Ed didn’t even come close.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha/edsatan] #