“Hand me that cymbal.”
Gin slurps his mega-drink.
“Oi!”
The cymbal is tossed near Mort, crash-smashing.
There are five taps at the door.
“There he is,” Gin says.
“There who is?” Mort asks.
“Didn’t Nan tell you?”
Mort shrugs. Five more taps.
“I finally got you a piper.”
“Your brother’s back from Germany?”
“Yeah.” Five more taps. “The psycho looks like a techno-goth now. He says he’s ready to release his soul into the body and shaft of the music or some weird shit like that.”
Taptaptaptaptap.
They stare at each other. Gin slurps his mega-drink.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Mort asks.
Gin slurps his drink.
Pause.
Taptaptaptaptap.
Slurp.
“I’m on break,” Gin says.
“You tit.”
Taptaptap…
Mort staggers from the drum pieces, across to the door and opens to the tapper, who is Vod — a depression-faced, robot vampire of a man, dark clothes, pale skin, and… a bagpipe.
“Hello. I am Vodka.” His voice an emotionless, fake German accent. “But people do not call me Vodka. They call me Vod.”
“I’m Mort.”
“Yes, but people do not call you Mort. They call you Mortician. That is very amusing.”
“Come in then.” Mort swells with boredom in Vod’s immediate presence.
Vodka creeps into the warehouse with his fingers stretched out like batwings. Dracula-eyes scoping the details of the warehouse. Then he freezes in mid-step when he sees the toilet situated in the middle of the room. He turns to Gin and raises an eyebrow, then glances back at the toilet.
“I find your toilet most delectable,” he says. “It beckons me to sit upon it.”
Without asking permission, he sits, slowly, preparing for ultimate gratification… and a satisfying smile cracks the corners of his face. “Wonderful.”
Pause.
Mort says, “So you’re the lad with the bagpipes?”
“Ja,” Vod says, “and I’m so excited to release my soul into their shafts, and to become one with my music, that I cannot resist an erection.”
Mort’s face contorts, turning to Gin. “Wanna come with me to get the rent from John?”
“Get it yourself,” Gin says.
“I’m not going to John’s by myself. He’s… old.”
“Then take Vodka.”
Vod exclaims, “I DO NOT WISH TO LEAVE THE TOILET SEAT.”
Gin, sipping at the mega-drink, scratching a soft spot on his hip, and Mort, swinging a saber, pass an Abraham Lincoln midget as they stroll behind the warehouse.
They get to a fire engine red door in the back of the warehouse. A BIG doggie door covers half the entrance, with a sign reading, “Beware of Doggie.”
A questioning face emerges from Mort’s neck.
“That’s a big doggie door,” Gin says. “I didn’t think there were doggies that size.”
“Thought I told John he’s not allowed to have pets,” Mort says. “Arr.”
Mort hums the door buzzer.
Gin says, “Maybe it’s to scare away burglars and Mormons.”
Mort buzzes again. “He’s not answering.”
“But he’s always here.” Gin buzzes.
Pause.
Gin rubs his neck, sipping the mega-drink. “Look through the doggie door.”
“No, thanks,” says Mort, “I don’t want to see the doggie that needs a door that big.”
Gin laughs. “Afraid?”
“Arr!” Mort flips him off. “You do it.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Go ahead then.”
“I will.”
“Then do it.”
“I will.”
Gin bends down, scratching a breast.
“Then do it.”
“Shut up, I’m doing it.” Gin throws open the doggie door and looks inside.
But first:
Spin-feelings rush into Gin, giving form to a large orange structure in Gin’s head which is a living being quite like the cross between a tapeworm and an apartment building. This creature is the offspring of Gin’s hangover, and Gin’s head is the incubator, pulsating warmth. It takes twenty-four hours before it will leave into the outside world, and Gin will have to bear its pain until then. He gets this infant in his head many times a week from drinking too much hard alcohol — which, of course, is gin.
And with the infant/creature handing him a blood-rushing of the head, Gin doesn’t realize the doggie on the inside of the doggie door. The doggie being of a certain breed that no one has ever seen before. It is the John breed. Well, it is actually just John himself, naked and on all fours, growling with foam. A fat, bald, middle-aged man that thinks he is an attack doggie.
Then, just as an attack doggie would, John flies toward the intruder, splashing the mega-drink between them. And Gin screams out, flap-dashing down the street with the human doggie chasing him, barking.
And Mort bends down to pick up the rent money settled on the ground just within the door, inside of an envelope with two flowers and a pencil and four paper clips and some breakfast, and the bills have little smiles drawn onto the president faces in blue ink.
The naked doggie springs at Gin’s legs, thumping him to the ground, handing him a large number of claw-scratchings.
The Abraham Lincoln midget comes to save the young man from further injuries, rapping John-doggie on the scalp with a rolled-up newspaper, which angers the wannabe doggie, turning to Lincoln midget and biting his pant leg, thrashing it about.
Gin darts away.
Mort, from a distance, gives a cluttered face — a confused spectator watching John chase Lincoln down the street, barking and biting at his ankles.
Back to me:
I find myself reading a Mutilation Man comic book at a corner store/liquor store, and I’m not positive how I got here. Mutilation Man swirls off the page and hides under the magazine rack, which looks more like a transformer in my eyes.
Christian and Nan are searching the shelves for nice cheap liquor.
“What you want?” Christian asks, swarming his arm around Nan’s stomach.
“I don’t know. They’re all too expensive.”
“Just pick one. You can afford it.”
“Well, you’re hasty all of a sudden.”
“Bite me.”
She bites him on the chubby part of his shoulder and he screams a laugh. Then she grabs a bottle of Fork’s Gum for him.
“Whiskey?” amazed at her choice. She usually drinks butter almond rum.
Christian takes it to the cashier, a brown-haired, blond mustache-bearing man, who has never slept with a woman under the age of forty, who is now reading a newspaper.
Christian puts the bottle and his ID onto the counter.
The cashier looks up from his paper. “Eight even,” he says.
Nan throws some crumpled bills. The cashier glances at the cash and then tosses them back. “Sorry, I can’t accept this.” He goes back to his paper.
“Why not?”
“I don’t accept American money.”
Christian and Nan stare at him for a few minutes.
“How can you not accept American money in an American store?” Christian asks.
“For your information, this store isn’t in America. It’s in New Zealand.”
“No, it’s not. It’s in America.”
The cashier slams the newspaper. “Didn’t you read the sign?”
“What sign?”
The cashier jumps over the counter to the glass of the door and picks up a small piece of notebook paper with four words written in magic marker.
It reads: