“It’s crazy,” he says. “I love it. It’s chaos.”
“Anarchy,” Aggie says.
Boot Lips doesn’t understand that he is at risk of losing his soul, nor does he know about heaven getting shut off for good. He never believed in heaven anyway. Boot Lips is another person who wants to go to Punk Land when he dies, but I don’t think Punk Land really exists. Maybe my faith isn’t strong enough. He doesn’t realize that the world is bread festering with mold, nor does he realize that Gin is dead and still walking around, and hisself could soon be like Gin too.
Gin is still stiff with flaky meat emotions. Scared maybe. And Breakfast is hidden away in his patched pack, scraping to get out, hungry.
“The world is just as I always wanted it,” says Boot Lips.
“Apocalyptic?” Nan utters.
“I like living in craziness and being unstable.” Boot Lips begins picking at a wart. “Nothing makes sense anymore and I want us to hold on to that. The world has always been a boring place of order, at least in America, with chaos only in some ghetto areas. But even the ghetto chaos was boring. They were all about who’s who; ghetto gangsters were childish and superficial. They weren’t much different from rich white preppies from the suburb areas who hated anyone different, hated anything that wasn’t part of the trends. Even punks were superficial back then, confused about what the definition of trendy was. Now there’s no trends to follow. Nobody to look up to or down to, besides yourself. And nothing gets boring here. Nothing.”
Right now, I want to tell Boot Lips about how our situation is more serious than he realizes, and how the walm will take his soul, and how he’s damned to this world forever. But I don’t tell him. He looks too happy and too excited about the world. I don’t want to bring him down.
Boot Lips tells us about his band Slaughter Shoes. Nan invites him to play at our Listen Day Concert tonight, even though Nan has no business booking bands at our shows. She has a new swimmy personality around Sid and starts to realize that she would rather be with him than Gin. Normally Gin would’ve cared about Nan’s change of heart. But now he’s consumed by writhe-suffering today.
A few seconds later, Nan takes Gin aside, around the back of a water store, to tell him how she feels. I want to follow them, but my God’s Eyes decide to go inside of Boot Lips’ brain instead. I discover that he doesn’t have any more interest in Nan. He wants to stay with Aggie.
The only thing I hear Nan tell Gin is: “I don’t want a man with an wormy penis.”
I’m sure Nan and Gin will stay friends. They’ve been close for quite a long time and Boot Lips doesn’t want Nan. But, surprisingly, Gin’s emotions don’t seem to get any lower after Nan’s breakup statement; he’s already hit the craggy undersurface. The sight of his hand dancing in his food was the breaking point. It doesn’t really matter what happens to him now, with or without soul.
I eat my food slowly because Nan wants to hang around here until the show starts. Aggie and Sid take off to get ready, pull Sid’s band together and maybe practice a little. Nan and Gin act like nothing’s happened between them, like they’re still together, but that’s because Gin is in agony and Nan pities him enough to try and make him feel better. As a friend.
“It’s over,” Gin says to us.
I suddenly get an odd feeling. Like the world is about to end, even though it can’t. Like something cataclysmic is about to happen, in Rippington, or maybe just in my life. Terrible.
Richard Stein once said that there will be a day when the world will crossover from its tiresome yet basically happy state to a place of PANDEMONIUM.
I think that day is here.
Scene 16
The Rabid Storm
The storm comes first.
It goops in as the sun blobs out. Orange fuzz dissolves into the skeletal-patterned skip-clouds, frigid with gray and hints of blue. Spider limbs talon-reach for the soap mountains on their avenue. Uneven faces secrete slowly out of it — the cloud is going to leak more people-creatures instead of rainwater, spat-splashing onto the great mob of overpopulation below.
It rents through light, oozes sideways, chokes it into darkness.
And dusk becomes night.
The mob:
Crowds of people sleeping in the streets, the carpet walkways, smushed into buildings like snail shells. All different races, sizes, shapes, colors, clothing, trying to ignore claustrophobia. Every empty piece of ground taken up by a living being. Rippington is Earth’s toy box, overflowing with piles and piles of action figures. They are motionless and hushed. Some coughs and shaking. Waiting for starvation to kill them and make them like Gin.
The roadway people become aroused when they see sheets of lightning dazzle-striping from the clouds. Flashes reflect against their BIG glazed eyes, haunting their children. Coils of wind corrupt their naked parts with invisible fingers. Some people enjoy the storm, for now — the water clouds aren’t collapsing yet — because there’s no amusement in Suffocation Land besides what’s up in the air.
The warehouse is ready for another concert. It’s burning warm with gum-crammed groups of people and thick sweaty air. Mostly filled with walm people trying to get off the stormy streets, and some of the usual crowd of punks and skinheads, trying to get rid of their boredom. The rest of the usual punk crowd — the larger portion — must have lost too much soul to make it here.
There won’t be another show after this one.
Only two bands are playing tonight: The Oi!s and Sid’s band, Slaughter Shoes. My band was supposed to play too, but Christian refused. He said he wasn’t in the mood, and neither was Vodka. And Vodka has BIG round pads on his breasts. I don’t care for playing either; playing with my blue woman is more fun. I’m in my room with her right now, caressing her perfect ocean skin. Her sensations not as quick as a human’s but that’s because she is like a machine.
Slaughter Shoes starts playing — a melodic hardcore sound with a saxophone player. Boot Lips, the singer, hop-bangs to his songs, more soul-filled than anyone else here; it’s like the walm hasn’t touched him at all. He’s even more up-up than he was back at his apple barn. I’m sure his soul will outlive everyone’s in town. Good luck to him.
He really adored the steel sculptures that live inside the warehouse and ordered them to be placed in the center of the crowd, surrounding the toilet where Vodka is sitting. The sinister/gruesome aspect of the sculptures is what he liked. They are black and rusty and crude, also very sharp. One looks to be a palm tree of knives and another is like a tangle of meat hooks and a headless woman with spiked skin and sword nipples. She smiled at Boot Lips with her prickly vagina and he immediately fell in love.
The name of this unrefined sculpture is Fria.
Vodka sits alone on the toilet, staring at Fria’s butt and the butts of every other sculptures around him, boxed in like he’s in the bathroom stall of a sweat-dizzy night club, but the stall doors are sharp and spiny and stabbing inwards. He complains to the sculptures for crowding him, but they won’t give him anymore room. His stare is blank and evil, but his response is silence. And nobody outside of his little boxed space realizes that he’s in there.