Excerpts

Well, I was going to rant about what a dangerous crackhead Bill Parcells is, but I spent all my energy raving about the point in the Hamburg messageboard, so I've no interest in re-hashing it here. Sorry, friends. Ask me about it sometime.

Instead, you've been selected as a test-audience for several excerpts from my work-in-progress novel. You are reminded that this is a hurredly-written first draft (I've got 40 double-spaced pages so far in only two days of writing, so yah, it's coming rapid-fire), intended only as a bare-bones outline to be re-visted and re-written countless times, and added to, and deleted from, only after the sketch has been completed in (hopefully) several weeks. So don't pay attention to the quality of the diction, and just decide whether or not the plot sounds interesting. Dig?

The first two paragraphs:

As the sun rose over the 14-story Lazy Oasis Casino on Sunday morning, a lot of what we will loosely call people were still dropping coins into slots and watching for the right number combinations on their cards, and every single one of them looked up as a dark-skinned Olympian god emerged from the elevator and strode the floor with a cigar hanging from his lips and a Bloody Mary in his hands. This man looked like a movie star. This man was Johnny Mercer.

Johnny was no movie star. He was a brutal, calculating, and savage killer of the worst variety, and a highly paid one. This was for good reason. Johnny’s work didn’t just get the job done – it got it done so thoroughly that the corpses he left actually knew they were dead. And anyone associated with the corpse knew it was dead too, and they didn’t ask questions, or if they did they certainly didn’t linger around town long enough to hear the answers because otherwise they might find out things they really didn’t want to know. Sometimes ignorance can be – well, not bliss exactly, but what do you call that sensation associated with the choice between continued life and being ripped apart by a starving brown bear? Obvious? Sometimes, then, ignorance is obvious.

Action sequence from the end of Chapter 1:

“Fuck this punk,” spat another of the black giants. “Let’s just do it.”

“Nah, hold up, nigga,” said another. “He’s got a pretty face. Let’s take him downstairs and fuck his ass first.”

The others hooted at this, and as they were doing so Johnny’s left hand flew like the snap of a whip into his blazer and came out obscured by a jet-black 6-inch, .357 barrel pistol with “Mercer” engraved in immaculate cursive into a silver plate on the handle. He who had suggested killing Johnny right away was dead before he even saw Johnny move.

Johnny’s right hand plunged into the blazer and gripped the black plate marked “Johnny” on the handle of the white-gold twin-sister of the black pistol, but Funky Freddy put a bullet in his right shoulder before the hand could emerge and he dropped the weapon. Meanwhile, his left hand jerked slightly to the right and tore a hole in the thigh of another of the giants who roared with rage. His companions ducked for cover and pulled for their own guns, but by this time a giant to Johnny’s right had moved in and put a $300 chromium-enhanced baseball bat across his back.

Johnny fell to his knees and dropped the gun. Funky Freddy stepped forward and kicked it away.

“They were going to pay another gang do this,” he said, smiling down at his victim. “I had to agree to a real cheap contract just to land the gig.”

From the weird 2nd chapter:

This is rapid-fire evolution, or devolution, and you cannot be sure what works and what doesn’t anymore, so you don’t move anything, you just close your eyes …

The car was a ship, now, a burning ship in cold waters and it was sinking and all about him men dashed about, hammering at this, spraying water at that, turning screws, unscrewing, crying, laughing, shouting, whispering to each other. It was sinking slowly, but never going under, and somehow he understood that it would never go under, but neither would it ever reach its destination, and he wanted to help the men, but they would not stop for him, and he was too tired to chase them so he tried to find a life raft but he noticed the old man with the white teeth staring at him from farther down the deck and when he tried to go to him the man told him he could give him a life boat and held out his hand, and in his outstretched palm there was a gun. A pistol. A white-gold pistol with a black plate on the handle and cursive lettering and it looked familiar to him, so he asked the old man how he could use it and he said that it was easy, you just take it in your hand and hold it to your head and the ship will go away from you. The old man turned to walk away, toward an open door at the far end of the deck from which came a blue light but in which he could see no signs of what the room was or what it was for. He called to the old man and asked him what he could do to help these men whose ship was sinking and the old man laughed, his white teeth glowing in the light of the fire, and he said there was no helping these men, their ship was sinking and it was their own efforts to save it that were making it sink, and he said the lifeboat in your hand can only save six men including yourself.

For your convenience, the shortest (easily not the best) of the peices that appear in the 3rd chapter, entitled "Headlines":

AP News Bulletin (7-02-2011)
Chicago: Authorities revealed today that they have uncovered email correspondence between two high-ranking members of what is believed to be opposing crime organizations.

Details of what the emails contained are being kept quiet, but it is believed that they outlined a truce between the Kairos City based crime syndicate known as the Ninth Circle, and Bill and Augusten Burroughs who run organizations in several cities including Kairos and Chicago.

Authorities did acknowledge that the emails were sent late last year, although they declined to give specific dates.

One agent, speaking anonymously, said that his access to the emails had been limited, but from what he understood the crime families had been working together peacefully and slowly merging since October of last year. This, he explained, would account for the sharp decline in organized-crime related violence in Kairos over the past nine months.

The agent added that the emails referenced in vague terms a figure who they believe to be Johnny Mercer, a casino security director who disappeared last November and is believed to have been murdered by a drug dealer.

At this time, no other details are being made available to the public.

Two gruesome excerpts from Chapter 4 (don't read on if you're not a fan of gangster related violence):

“Who hired you?” Johnny asked.

“Eat a dick.” The man was trying to be tough, but you could see the terror in his eyes. Louie knew that the offender had also noticed the wire cutters in Johnny’s left hand.

The security guard took off his shirt, and Louie saw that this guy was capable of pulling a boa constrictor in half with his bare hands. He took two steps forward and drilled the offender right between the eyes, knocking him backwards off the table they had set him on.

“There’s two ways out of here,” Johnny said loudly, with no attempt to conceal the menace in his voice. “One is in the wheelbarrow.”

“Look, man,” the offender said, voice quivering as he picked himself up from the concrete floor. “I don’t know what you mean. Nobody hired me, I just –

With his left arm, the guard grabbed the offender by the neck and slammed him back down into the table while the right arm reined blows down on his body.

Johnny put a hand on the guard’s shoulder and the blows stopped. The offender whimpered pathetically.

“Louie,” Johnny said without looking over his shoulder. “Help Ted hold this guy still.”

Louie and the security guard took hold of the offender’s arms and legs and braced for resistance, but none came. At least not until Johnny reached for the zipper on the offender’s jeans, at which point the guy must have suddenly remembered the wire cutters in Johnny’s left hand and started doing weird math in his head that could not have been too far off from the truth. His limbs came to life like a crazed science experiment gone awry, and his torso lunged and twisted in unnatural directions. They kept a firm grip, and Johnny reached his right hand into the offender’s slacks and emerged with a long and narrow shaft.

(I've skipped over a lot of the bad stuff ... this comes about a page after the above):

Five minutes later Louie came out of the bathroom after the last of his dry heaves passed.

“Feeling better, sweetheart?” Johnny asked, as if talking to an old friend.

“Not really, Johnny,” Louie groaned. “I think my stomach’s in the toilet.”

“Feel like paying a visit to a guy named Crepshaw?”

“No. Not for less than ten grand.”

Johnny laughed. “That’s alright. I’ll take a couple guys over there tomorrow morning. We’re taking a limo down to the 49ers game in the evening if you want to come along.”

“I got a thing, Johnny. Thanks though.”

“Ah, no big deal. Next time.” Johnny lit a cigarette and turned back to his book. Sartre. "Nausea."

The name of the man who had hired the offender was Larry Crepshaw, a lawyer who worked for Bill Burroughs. The offender had suddenly come explicitly clean about this.

And duct-taping a burning dick into the mouth of the dick’s owner is not as hard as it sounds. Not for Johnny Mercer.

...

Allright. Those are just some fun excerpts. This baby is flying out of me. Fiction has never comet his easy to me. EVER! So I'm pretty excited about this damn thing, and I'm rolling with it until the tank runs out of gas. Leave your comments, old chums.

A Presto ...

Vagrancy at the Beach

WARNING: All of what follows is the true story of Mike Mumbach and Mike Sherry's trip to Myrtle Beach to meet Jeff Buss, Kev, Lisa, and Lindsey. It is INcomplete, as what has been recorded is merely the best our poisoned recollections would allow for. Nevertheless, what does exist is increasingly hellish and outright discouraging to responsible adults. Read on for good laughs (or creepy chills depending on your humor, or lack thereof). Just know what you're in for.

Now, let the fun begin!

It is between 3 and 4 am on Friday night (Saturday morning) and I'm trying to sleep poolside at a hotel I'm not staying in. I've got unexplained blood caked down the side of my jeans and only the vaguest of recollection of how I ended up here, in this lounge chair staring up at the South Carolina sky. Had I gone totally insane? Did I need immediate help? No, my body seemed to be working well enough - some sharp pain in both shoulders, but nothing permanent. How could this have happened? I'm 24-years-old, not 17, and I came down to this wretched Bible-thumping south land to try and find legitimate work as an honest English teacher, so why am I stone drunk on the beach, alone, and probably within a single hair from my receding line of being arrested. I better be careful.

It started, as these things usually do, with a suggestion. An innocent little offering that was only meant to help.

"Why not stop for some pounders?" I asked the Savage, who was driving us. We were roughly 10 miles north of our destination, and it was getting late.

No, it started before that I think. The recklessness, I mean. It was Thursday night at the Detroit airport and I had about twenty minutes until my plane took off for Charlotte. My stomach was asking for some attention and I was wondering around, looking sexy, and hoping to find some cheap and fast food. What I found was a Taco-Bell and a bar right next to each other. After very little deliberation I decided there was no reason to play this one quiet. No reason at all. I was on vacation, after all. Fuck food. Fuck food, even if all I'd had to eat all day was a half of a turkey sandwhich.

"Tall bud light draft, please," I told the waitress.

"Do you want to open a tab?" Hmm. Yes, I absolutely do. But I've got to be on a plane in fifteen minutes. Better just pay for this one.

Half an hour later I'm on the plane and the stewardess (pardon me, I meant flight attendant) is asking me if I want a drink.

"Bud light, please."

"That'll be five dollars." She's eyeing me suspiciously. Can she smell the 20 ounces I've already had on my breath, or is she mulling over whether she should ask for my ID? In any case, the 5 dollars seems steep considering I just spent $7 at the bar, but here again there was no reason to tickle the situation with any finesse. So by the time NW 1412 bounces off the Charlotte landing strip and comes back down for that final, hellish break-slamming 200-down-to-15 mph in less-than-5-seconds approach to the hangar, I've got to piss bad and it's going to take several bullets to the face, head, neck, breast, chest, and arms to stop my beeline directly off the plane.

This is when the Savage picks me up and suggests we go out for some drinks, despite it being midnight on a worknight (for him, poor chump). I'm game, and that piles a gin and tonic and 3 more budlights to Thursday's totals. Not bad for the first night of vacation. Moderate intake, the best way to proceed.

Fast-forward to Friday evening. The Savage and I are speeding through South Carolina, trying desparately to make it to the beach before it gets too late and everyone has already gotten drunk without us. I've got a $100 bill in my wallet from the crackhead at the Petty concert (see MySpace blog about the Petty concert for clarification: myspace.com/ilprimopazzo). This is where the true horror of the south really begins to hit home. After a couple hours of driving we realize we have passed more fucking diabetes clinics than liquor stores, no kidding. On the verge of a total physical breakdown on account of dangerously low blood-alcohol-levels, we dash into a gas station at around 7:30 and ask where we can find hard drink in this rotten state.

"Weeell," drawls the unhelpful redneck behind the counter. "There's one 'bout ten minutes back that a'waaays, but won't do you a bit o'good, reckon. Liquor stores close at seeeven round here."

Seven. Good fucking god. Who told you people to stop selling booze before most decent folks have even finished with their supper? We didn't ask the question, stupified as we were. But if we had asked it, I'm positive this clunky dipshit would have told us God ordered them to do it. A fact the Savage and I didn't learn until later is that these people are afraid to even acknowledge that they sell liquor at all - in this inbred state you won't see a sign for "Liquor Store." No, you'll see a sign for "ABC Packaging." Yes. That's correct. They actually disguise the fact that the goddamn place is a liquor store. It's PACKAGIIIIIIIIING!!!!

Contrary to popular opinion, I have a small amount of faith in humanity that remains hidden away deep within my powerful and manly breast. These types of soul-shockers do nothing to cultivate it. Finding out that there is a state in this country that stops selling liquor when the sun is still shining high overhead, and that it hides even this fact behind a phony business name (it might as well read "Tony's Golf Supplies"), is like being reminded that there are still poachers out there who are hunting down the last few rhinos and tigers that remain. It's a crossbow shot right to your little bit of personal faith in the general goodness of Americans, and a few more well-aimed arrows will eradicate this completely. Once again I must question how much longer Great Fire will allow this feeble Christian morality to infect our nation's most dim-witted.

Nevertheless, this is where things begin to get interesting. Our plan to put vodka to gatorade and thereby put down a few shots just before going into the bar (the idea being we would not have to spend an excessive amount of money playing catch up with our comrads) was completely shot, and this is where the suggestion to pick up some pounders came into play. We stopped at an odd looking grocery store that was called, if I'm not mistaken, Bi-Lo and emerged with two 24-oz Budlights each. We pulled the Savage's solstace down a sideroad (which we realized too late was straight and disturbingly ghetto, but we stuck it out anyway) and slammed the first of the tall boys rapidly.

We drove for another ten or fifteen minutes and found our way to Broadway at the Beach, an elaborate outdoor assembly of shops and restaurants and bars and vulgar American tourists and drunk 20-somethings dripping with STD's and looking to fuck anything that looks remotely human (or even not) and of course foul-mouthed, ill-tempered drunk recluse's (such as, for instance, myself). We parked and finished off the final two pounders. Our compatriots (Buss, Lisa, Kev, and Lindsey) were waiting for us, already drunk, at an obnoxious place called "Duelling Pianos" (the idea here is that two assholes sit up at opposing grand pianos and take requests (and substantial tips if you want to have your song played) from the crowd - at which point they play their pianos and sing the parts of the songs they know and all the drunk clowns screech with glee and sing along and prove to the world that they are indeed having a good time for themselves, god bless them).

The plan was simple. We would drink quickly and with purpose, and when we went back to the bar, I would buy the shots and the Savage would buy the well drinks. The execution of this plan was even simpler than the plan itself. This, quite unsurprisingly, is where the whole trip began to take a downward spiral into nightmarish delinquency...

To be continued ...

Part the 2nd:
Who are these assholes? I mean, there's actually people going up on stage to dance in front of these alleged "duelling" pianos. Not one of them can dance of course and they all like to do that thing where they move their feet really fast while everything above the waist stays still as a corpse. You know, that "really neat trick" people who CAN'T DANCE do to fool you into thinking that they can dance. Fuck these people. And if I hear one more country music song - especially that heinous and contemptible "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" - I might take a few of them down in a hellish knife battle.

Oh, here we go. The fucking "Hokey-Pokey". That's it, we're leaving. Round up the troops, and let's go across the street.

The boob protecting this door lets me in despite the fact that I've completely erased (inadvertantly) the stamp on my hand. Only once inside do I realize I've been duped. Dragged into an even worse dream sequence of terror. A DANCE CLUB! No trouble here. Retreat to the second floor balcony and stake out a tract of land to be protected at great human expense if need be. I've got my good chums at my side on this one - Jeff and Kev hate dancing more than I do. Plus, there's a bar up here! Perfect. The shots and well drinks continue to flow like billions of dollars out of the American budget, which is to say alarmingly fast. Before I know it the Savage is screaming rudely at the bartender and she's fixing us with a stare that would boil a lesser man's flesh on the spot. Something is wrong here. Aren't native-american's supposed to be peaceful, earth-loving original-hippies? Why is the Savage behaving in this strange manner?

Next he's passed out on a chair and a bouncer is telling us to keep him awake or the lot of us are getting thrown out. So Lisa and Lindsey do the worst thing imaginable given the circumstances (though how could they have known?). They actually bring this drunk Indian out on to dance to keep him awake. And not just on the dance floor, but on the dance STAGE. This wakes him up, and next thing I know it I've been summoned to dance as well. So be it. I will suck it up for a very few minutes and then move back into the shots.

That damn savage. Now he's on the warpath, and he's out for blood. Before I know it I'm being dragged across the dance floor, agoraphobia and cloustraphobia screaming against the inside walls of my head like rape victims, and now this wretched friend of mine is trying to force his way into packs of strange girls. Thank god these two girls don't want to dance with us, now I can make my escape, hussle back to the bar and order up a gin and tonic and a shot of Jack.

But wait! The Savage is actually trying to dance with these girls. They've quite obviously given us the cold shoulder, and yet he persists! Again the feeling that something is wrong creeps up my spine and spits at the back of my eyes, but I can't quite place it. Whatever, I decide. God bless him. I know how he is, and I sure as shit know how these drunk girls are, and there is no doubt in my mind that he will get them to dance sooner or later. I shuffle off with my dignity in tact to watch the not-quite-Homeric-epic that is about to unfold.

It doesn't amount to much. Drinks in hand, Kev, Buss, and I laugh while Mike dances completely by himself for the better part of fifteen minutes. But bless his heart, he did exactly what I knew he'd do ... they finally realized he wasn't going away, and so they took mercy on his Savage heart and danced with him. Hats off to a persistant mother fucker. I guess. Kev and I bolted back to the bar for more shots, and then we dropped the DJ $5 to hear Montel Williams' "This is How We Do It," which seemed funny to us at the time. And I suppose it still is.

Ah, let's see here. What happened next? Things were beginning to get very blurry and confused. Thank god the balcony wasn't too crowded. And yet those wretched girlfriends of my chums managed to drag me back out on that dance stage again. And this time it got good - some drunk tit wanders over, drink in hand, trying to be a big shot and dance with Lindsey and Lisa. I'm trying not to be rude, but at the same time I cannot let him move in while these girls' boyfriends are standing fifteen feet above us watching the whole thing unfold. But this persistent ass (does this sound familiar?) keeps pushing his way in and trying and finally I am forced to turn a 90 degree angle and cut him off bodily from the action. At which point Lisa says something rude to him, and faced with this double insult he goes off to do exactly what any upstanding frat-boy dickhead with greasy hair would do.

That is to say, he goes to fetch his upstanding frat-boy dickhead with greasy hair friends. I've got gin and goldshlager in me for the most part at this point. I'm drunk as a skunk, but thankfully it has only been in the last few minutes that I've moved into the Jack Daniels, so there is still an oppurtunity for this situation to be resolved peacably. And, surprisingly, this turned out to be rather easy. As Lisa and Lindsey bolted off the stage and up the stairs to the balcony I very politely said, "Buddy, these girls have boyfriends that are standing right up there. They don't want to dance with you, it's nothing personal." I think my jaw hit the floor when he nodded his head and said "okay," and turned around to go lurk somewhere else with his clique of frat-nipples. Wow. Don't question it. Just go back upstairs.

Well, by this point we'd had enough. Montell played and we decided to leave. Now to fetch the Savage. This was no easy task. He saw us waving and pointing to the door and calling to him, and rather than join us he merely nodded his head and waved back. Well fuck, we thought. We wandered outside, wondering if this redskin friend of ours was going to join us or not. We realized very quickly that he wasn't. This required me and Lisa going on a Private-Ryan style recovery mission and dragging the kid bodily out of the place.

Things didn't improve at this point. As we limped off to the parking lot to search for a cab, I noticed one of those dimly lit, classier looking joints with good music - the kinds of places that call to me in that ancient language of silence and speak of illimitable oppurtunity and bottomless booze. I forcibly hijacked the entire group and deposited us squarely within this establishment, ignoring all protests and pleas to think of the time and money situation. Herein the Savage and I continued to drink like thirsty desert travelers, and soon enough this redskin compatriot of mine was seeking to dance again. Things were really getting hazy at this point, so the following is a paraphrase of Jeff Buss's re-telling of the short time we spent in this bar.

"After you guys had some drinks, Mumbach wanted to dance again and for some reason you decided to go along with it. So you went up to these two girls and said 'I'm sorry, but my friend really wants to dance, would it offend you if we danced with you guys for a while,' and the girls politely accepted. But they only danced for a couple of songs and then we noticed they kind of snuck away from you guys and said they were just going to get a drink or something, but they went to the bar and started talking to other people who must have been the friends they were with. When I came outside with Kev and Lindsey and Lisa, we noticed them coming out the side door and we walked by them and they kind of looked at us weird, so I don't know if they were trying to sneak away from you guys or what."

There's no way to tell for sure, but I'd put the odds at somewhere around 97% that they WERE.

Here's where things begin to get really retardedly savage. The $100 in my wallet is gone ... all of it. Mumbach has dropped an easy $100 as well. I have no recollection of leaving Broadway at the Beach, nor of the cab ride home. I certainly do not remember riding the elevator back up to the 18th floor. There is some vague images in my head of being back in the suite and coaxing a room key out of Buss and convincing my poor, hopelessly enebriated Savage that the night was young. And I suppose it was young by any loveless, purposeless vagrant's standards. Still, this is no reasonable explanation as to why we ended up on the beach, me telling racist jokes to four middle-aged strangers and Mike wandering around in the surf in the socks he walked out of the room in without shoes.

To be continued ...

Part the 3rd
I look down the length of my body from where I lay in this poolside lounge chair and I'm seriously concerned about the blood caked to my jeans. Was it mine? Or is it possible that I put the outside part of my left calf across the right side of some punk's face (I would find out that I can indeed kick that high - more on this later, stay tuned)? There's enough blood here that schools of sharks are probably swimming close by trying to figure out how to hail a taxi cab up the beach.

At any rate, where we left off, I've managed to bum a room key from Buss and buzz out of the room like a determined hornet. I only wish I could say what my purpose was. There's mostly only shadows left from that night now. Vague images without context or chronological sequence. I remember a picture of the Savage kicking over a garbage can. I remember jumping over a wall. I remember emerging into a parking garage and dragging the Savage off his back where he was trying to sleep in front of a car. I DO remember making it down to the beach. As I said, Mumbach had managed to walk out of the hotel room in just his socks ... no shoes whatsoever. I managed to walk out all dolled up like I had just emerged from the VIP lounge - tight shirt, Aeropastale jeans, brown shoes, and more jewelry than any man should ever be caught wearing (three earrings, two necklaces, and a leather bracelet).

We were down on the beach, and there's no way to know for sure how we started talking to this pack of middle-aged tourists, but we did nevertheless. Mike kicked about in his socks where the waves met the beach, and one of these tourists honored me with his finest, very forgettable racist joke. I say forgettable, but I can't be sure if that is because the joke sucked so I forgot it, or if I was too pissed on gin to remember it. Either way, I fired back with the only racist joke I know ... the one from "Boondock Saints." And I told it immaculately. My pacing, pitch, and voice were really on that night ... I know this because the tourists erupted (I do not exxagerate when I say erupted, for this is what it was) with laughter when I delivered the final punchline of the bit -- "I'll have a coke!"

But something turned sour and I don't remember what. It could have been something rude I said at some point, or it could have just been the unsettling appearance of a lurching, swaying Indian in the water, but something scared our new friends off. They suddenly scuttled up the beach, muttering goodbyes, and when I pursued one of them to shake his hand and bid him good evening, he turned around sharply, shook my hand out of obligation and then whisked off without so much as smiling or saying goodbye. How depressing. I thought there was real comradarie there. Real understanding.

Okay, so again we must remember that this is all TO THE BEST OF MY RECOLLECTION as far as time sequencing. I can't prove the order of any of this, but I believe it was at that point that we headed back up to the road with every intention of getting back to the room. When we emerged on Ocean Blvd., who should be standing across the road and fifty feet to our left but one-two-three-FOUR cops. Just standing there, talking. No trouble here, though. We aren't breaking the law and we have every right to be out at this hour - we're responsible young adults, not depraved young pac-marked teenagers.

Again the feeling that something was terribly wrong strikes me just as my Savage companion begins shouting insults at the officers. This isn't right, but what isn't right about it I wonder? And I wish I could remember what this monstrous halfwit Blanket-Ass sidekick of mine was shouting too, because it was something horrible and the cops looked up at us right quick. The last time the Savage tried to get lippy with a cop, the night ended with my truck wrapped around a telephone pole, so I wasn't having any of it. I made a beeline away from the Bogan, and he hauled ass after me, and thank Jesus Master of Tittyfucking Christ that these cops left us alone. But there was no way I was ducking into a hotel at this point. I didn't want them following us in to make sure we weren't vandelizing the place (actually this was a convenient and temporary excuse to disguise the fact that I couldn't remember for the life of me which hotel we were in).

Back to the beach. At this point the Savage goes face first into the sand and won't be budged. Right in front of a damn lifegaurd tower. Oh well. It's late and I don't know where the hotel is. Might as well sleep on the beach. But a wooden lifegaurd tower is a monstrous thing to get comfortable in. I abandoned it quickly, and failed again to wake my Bow-Bending companion. I couldn't abandon him here ... but I was dressed too immaculately to join him in the sand. Plus I just hate being dirty. So I compromised. I walked up to the nearest hotel, walked into their pool area, and decided to make it Base Camp.

I do remember this ... walking for the lounge chair in the farthest, most isolated corner. There were people in the pool, which was odd because it had to have been pushing 4am and the pools are supposed to close at 10. But then I was there, so what was to stop them? At least they were swimming. And come to think of it, this was a nice pool. It kind of wound around in a misshapen circle with an island in the middle, and there were floats so you could drift around ... like a lazy river, I don't know. Jarring, no doubt, for the people in the pool, this fully clothed, wobbly drunk fellow who had stumbled into the pool area from the beach, not from the hotel, and was now staggering around the outside smiling at them while they regarded him with an extremely wary eye. I caught myself smiling ... sorry, I hadn't expected to see such a cool pool, and I certainly hadn't expected to see people in it.

But this led to bad things. For me. Because I wasn't just gassed, I was positively crocked. And even though I took the far lounge chair, and even though I struck a cool pose with one leg down and one leg up and arms folded behind my head, and even though I turned my head to face away from them, I knew that these people were thinking one of two things -- they were either terrified of this potentially dangerous drunk that had just climbed up out of the sand, smiling, to invade the sanctity of their pool, or they were thinking here's a harmless chap who tied one on a little too hard tonight ... either way was bad news bears for me. I didn't want to be reported to security, or worse the cops, but then I didn't want them making a mockery of me.

This is how I wound up unable to pass out. Which brings us back to where we started ... between 3 and 4 am on Friday night (Saturday morning) and I'm trying to sleep poolside at a hotel I'm not staying in. I've got unexplained blood caked down the side of my jeans and only the vaguest of recollection of how I ended up here, in this lounge chair staring up at the South Carolina sky. Had I gone totally insane? Did I need immediate help? Etc. Etc., you read it before, presumably.

Now, I don't know how long I stayed there ... in my state it could have been anywheres between five minutes and two hours, but if I had to guess I would hazard a good thirty-five minutes. Thirty-five minutes, bonkers out of my mind on booze, and now becoming completely unglued over who these people in the pool were and what they were going to do, and more important ... how the fuck was I going to get back to the suite?? Eventually it was time to be proactive and so I stood up and headed back for the sand from whence I'd come.

Now, this couldn't have looked good to the pool dwellers either. At least this time I had the good sense to keep my hands in my pocket, my eyes pointed at the ground, and dart swiftly for the gate. God only knows what explanation these people came up with. I'll admit, I'm curious. At any rate, I hit the sand and remembered instantly that I had left a man behind. Right? I didn't imagine that, did I? It's obvious in retrospect, but at the time I couldn't be sure. And I wasn't. So I turned left and headed down the beach, and eventually came upon the body of a 220-lb Buffalo-Jockey lying face down in the sand in front of a lifegaurd tower. Ah yes. Mumbach. He looked dead from where I stood. And this didn't change as I came closer.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. What had been bothering me all night about his behavior. Yes, that's it! Seeing the formerlly belligerent, sloppy mess suddenly implode and go face first into the sand ... the Germans!! At some point during our drinking explosion, deep down inside that hopelessly muddled cesspool of ethnicities running through the poor bastard's blood, Mike's internal ethnic behavioral systems had been jarred out of "Savage" and thrust suddenly into "Nazi." The poor lad had gone from cowboy-killer to Krout in a matter of minutes. Gone was the peaceful, rain-dancing nature of the Mumbach we all know and love, and shoved upon was the war-mongering, all-conquering spirit of the german warrior - which of course, as we know, invariably recedes into shameful defeat.

Peace, old friend. This night is not over yet. After an eternity of trying to revive the poor bastard and explain to him where he was, and to then explain to him that I was incapable of explaining to him how he'd gotten there, we pushed upwards, away from the beach, headed back for the hotel. Ultimately, it took my going into a random hotel lobby and showing them my room key in order to be pointed in the right direction. They told us how to get to the appropriate building, and surprisingly we got there. Then came the next problem. How do we get back to the room ... after riding the elevator aimlessly for (again) what could have been anywhere between five minutes and two hours, but was probably more like fifteen minutes, we sucked it up and went to the girl at the lobby desk. She told us the room. No sooner had we gotten in the elevator then we realized we'd both forgotten what she had told us. So we rode the elevator aimlessly for another (probably) fifteen minutes (again, this is all assembled from jumbled pictures in my brain, so specifics are difficult, and accurate dialogue is totally impossible) before I told Mike to stay with the elevator while I went and finessed the girl up front.

I do remember her laughing at me. But she told me again which room we were in (floor 18, room 05) and even wrote down the desk number so as we wouldn't have to come all the way back down if we forgot again. Well, we didn't forget. But now the room key didn't work. Somehow she didn't believe me, but she was nice enough to send security up with another key. Home sweet home. Finally we could pass out, just in time to miss the sun showing it's terrible face over the horizon.

The next day we realized some things. First of all, I felt like I had horrible sunburn on my shoulder, but I knew this was impossible. It turned out to be a massive scrape and deep bruise. I still have it almost one whole week later. What I don't have is a memory of how I got it. I also realized I had a deep bruise on the bicep of my left arm ... again, this is still here but what is missing is any explanation for it. Another thing we realized was that the Savage's big toe had been positively and totally massacred. His sock (again, recall that the poor bastard was wandering around all night in JUST SOCKS) was soaked through with more blood than it seemed was even possible for a person to have in a single big toe. The end of that toe featured a nice, thick chunk that flapped back and forth. Again, there was no explanation for this that either of us could recall - though there were those two disjointed images of Mike kicking over a garbage can (we might have a winner!) and of us jumping over a wall (this is a good possibility as well!).

A final thing we noticed - or actually, Buss noticed it - was the shoe marks on the door to the room. Of course! I remember kicking the door before calling the girl in the lobby. I was pissed that the key didn't work, and I was hoping I could wake Jeff and Lisa up to let us in. The thing about this was the impressive height of the shoe marks. They were at the level of my head! There is no way I could have landed a kick that high if I was sober ... though, I suppose I've never tried to land a very high kick when I'm sober so this might be a moot point and maybe I really can and just don't know it. And I don't plan on finding out for fear of my groin being ripped to shreds.

At any rate, there was a lot of reasonable, level-headed fun that prevailed for the rest of the trip at Myrtle Beach, and I expect to write another blog about it, but this is not the place for it. These three parts were dedicated to the Vagrancy and hell-bent Debauchery of that first night. It was, all in all, a damn fine episode. Shameful, certainly, but legendary at the same time.

Hope you enjoyed. A Presto, chums.

Meditations Over Cigars

The staff of Dominion of Cool was sitting in a local cigar shop the other night, down in the parlor area, puffing on a few shamefully cheap domestic stogies with all the smug confidence of those puffing on expensive imports, and we got to talking about this thing we do. This blog. How to account for it, and how to describe it?

DOC Staffer #1: ~~ (Sudden, quick burst of smoke from lips) ~~ It's sort of like the human digestive tract. Stuff comes in, is processed, and gets turned into waste. The bi-product of brain digestion can take many forms, and in our case it seems best suited to blogging. So "Dominion of Cool" is our brains taking a shit. ~~ (Ashes cigar into tray, presumably to underscore argument) ~~

DOC Staffer #2: But waste is such an ugly and inconvenient thing. I'd like to think this blog is worth people's time whether they realize it or not. If not for insight and character, at least for entertainment. ~~ (Long, dramatic puff followed by equally dramatic exhale) ~~ I think of it as a kind of odd little museum display. An esoteric construction that involves the time and passion - indeed, it could be said, even the very heart and soul - of the creaters, but with limited appeal to the public at large. None of which lessens its significance, but rather is only to suggest that the value of the thing, while not strictly intrinsic as such, is limited to a select and privelidged crowd who "get it."

DOC Staffer #3: ~~ (Series of short puffs followed by rapid consecutive smoke plumes) ~~ It's a savage little midget with a lazy eye who wants to chew off your balls and take you out at the knees with a lead pipe.

DOC Staffer #2: Why would he want to do that? Is his reasoning that the physical pain he is inflicting upon you is the equivalent of the psychological pain he suffers because of what society would deem his "abnormalities"?

DOC Staffer #3: (Shrugs) He's an angry prick. What do you want from me?

DOC Staffer #4: ~~ (Inhales for what seems an eternity, and then exhales -- only no smoke comes out, and this really creeps out DOC Staffers #1-3) ~~ It's a self-absorbed schitzophrenic with obsessive compulsive disorder.

DOC Staffer #1: Okay ... in what way?

DOC Staffer #4: It is self-absorbed because it doesn't give a good fuck who is reading and what they are thinking about it, or whether they are entertained or not. It cares only that this blog alleviates some of its own boredom, and more importantly it gets a huge kick out of itself - which is to say the entertainer is simultaneously the entertained. ~~ (Suddenly coughs, and all that smoke from before comes billowing out, taking, strangely enough, the shape of Don Knotts) ~~ It is schitzophrenic because it refers to itself as a "staff" when it is, truthfully, only one person. Me. However, it is one person that wears a lot of different masks. For instance, DOC Staffer #1 is the bottom-liner, no-horseshit straight-talker. He calls them as he sees them, and we all know that this blog has never been one to pussy-foot around issues with any degree of delicacy. DOC Staffer #2 is the reflective, quite often pompous intellectual - always prepared with eloquent diction and valuable insights, but continuously undermines his own credibility by taking things too far. DOC Staffer #3 is the rotweiller. He is the snarling, slobbering fangs of the group. The one who is not only ready for a fight, but who wants one bad enough to the point where he will launch grenades into peoples' homes just to start one.

DOC Staffer #1: Then what are you?

DOC Staffer #4: Me? ~~ (Chews the end of his cigar without puffing, hoping this effect will make him look wise) ~~ I'm the meta-blogger. I'm the awareness of the blog as a blog. I'm the disease and the prescription, the doctor and the patient. I'm an abstract speaker of pointed things, and a direct speaker of complicated things. I am, gentleman, the artifice of the construct.

DOC Staffer #3: You're a doosch bag.

DOC Staffer #2: And where, pray, does the OCD bit come into play, as you stated before?

DOC Staffer #4: Ah yes, the obsessive trait. Well, that one is obvious to us, but not necessarily to the readers, if indeed there are any. For instance, as of the period at the end of this sentence we've been working on this for half an hour. Why? If there are readers, they'll skim over it in less than a minute, maybe get a chuckle, and move on with their shallow lives. Why spend half an hour doing this? Because this blog is obsessive in its passion for detail. Take this very contrivance for instance ... it started out as a harmless bit of comedy, and somehow turned into a developed dialogue between four distinctly different characters, all with very different personalities and individual voices, all of which had to be planned and carefully manipulated into fruition. The comedy aspect was not jetisoned, naturally, and needed to be worked in as well ... hence the funny insults, and the random inexplicables like when no smoke came out after I took a puff. ~~ (Takes a puff and this time smoke comes out) ~~ There again. You see? And of course, there was the usual attention to sentence structure and organization, pacing for maximum effect, and that most important of writerly maxims ... the undying "le mot just"!!

DOC Staffer #2: Ah, the "perfect word" as it were.

DOC Staffer #1: We knew that.

DOC Staffer #3: And if they didn't, fuck 'em.

DOC Staffer #4: There's the obsessiveness again. That little interjection was because of our control-freak need to make sure the reader knew exactly what we were talking about. But it had to be done as part of the dialogue, which takes it to another level of obsessiveness. Why couldn't we just have put "the perfect word" in parenthesis? Or even just said it straight out in the first place?

Then there's also the physical showmanship of the thing. For instance, will the reader know that initially the ~~'s before the cigar-smoking descriptions were originally typed in as --'s? No. Will they know that we went back and changed them to ~~'s because we thought it kind of resembled drifting smoke? No. Will it even occur to them that this is what it's supposed to resemble? No, nor are they meant to, for we intended that as a sub-conscious suggestion. One of those subtle flourishes that improve the overall quality without even once drawing attention to itself. And if it fails completely, does that stop us? No. Why? Because we are OBSESSIVE!!!!

Cigar shop owner: You boys are going to have to take it outside. Some sophisticated fellas just came in and bought real cigars, and they need these chairs to smoke them.

DOC Staffer #1: Ours are real cigars! ~~ (Puffs furiously on cigar to prove point) ~~

Cigar shop owner: Pardon me. I meant they bought the kinds of cigars that men of taste and grooming purchase with the money that is actually in their wallets. Not strawberry swisher sweets like you boys spent a whopping few singles on.

DOC Staffer #3: Fuck you, Eichmann.

The night, as can be expected any time the Staff of the Dominion of Cool goes out together, ended badly, with plenty of bruised egos and every more badly bruised bones.

THE END!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!