Joe Blog

Chapter Seventy Three

2007-04-28T19:48:00.000-05:00

I've never used an "Exit" sign to find a way out of a room. Never. I remember seeing them in darkened theaters and airplanes but never once followed their plea.

There was one in the office of Foote, Carp, and Thor where I had worked as an accountant but the only time I noticed it was once, during the Christmas season, somebody had hung a piece of mistletoe from it with duct tape.

That was the only time I ever kissed Lynette.

The far end of the room could only be seen by squinting and a door that looked like the entrance to a restaurant kitchen, with pleated and padded leather on the front and two circular porthole windows gently swinging in the distance. Above it was a red, blinking, "Exit" sign. The letters were so small that I couldn't actually read the word, but I recognized the general shape. I walked briskly towards the it.

To the right of the door was the kind of clock they used to have in the classrooms at William Henry Harrison Elementary, where I had filled a miniature desk with my tiny, prepubescent body. It was large, black and white, and protected by a thick, wire shield. The minute and second hand arrived together at the top of the hour and a loud, obnoxious alarm broke the deathly silence in the room.

Human beings by the hundreds, spilled in, flowing into the cubicles and around me like gravy pouring onto a blob of gray, mashed potatoes. Still having 360 degree vision, my mind was overwhelmed with the sheer numbers of faces and physiques as they enveloped me like an ocean wave.

I could see no difference between what I was seeing and what you would normally find in your average, big city office building. There were men in shiny suits and women with their hair pushed back and wrapped around their heads like cake frosting. I saw men that looked disheveled and under-slept. A few women had put too much makeup on their faces, applied so unevenly that it appeared to have been performed while riding on bumpy, public transport.

Alan Bob Johnson looked just as I had remembered him, trying to push his sloppy way between a slickly dressed, ladies man and one of the frosting women. His white, stained shirt was too small for the beef on his stocky frame and his collar was flapping upward, revealing the thin black string of a tie underneath. He was sweating.

I had worked with Al-Bob at the accounting firm. His presence here gave me the thought that this must be hell because I don't remember him ever being happy for even one day at Foote, Carp and Thor. Let me tell you right now that this is not hell. I was completely wrong to assume so. As it turns out, some people really love to complain and be unhappy. To some people, Hell IS Heaven.

"Alan! It's me Marty!" I pushed my way through the crowd at met him at his desk.

"Marty!" Al-Bob gave me a hug and I instantly felt a little dirty.

"What are you doing here?

"Dead Marty." He spoke in the high pitched voice of a man with a tiny penis. "Freak accident a couple of months ago. I opened the door of my pickup to spit out some chaw and I'll be damned if Chester the Molester didn't come speeding by in that damned little Mitsubishi of his and decaptivate my whole Goddamn head."

"Sounds bad"

"Didn't feel a fuckin thing Marty. One second I'm spittin and the next second I'm talkin to my late Grandfather Moe." He opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out a tin can and spit a drippy wad pretty close to making it entirely in the container.

"I see it didn't put you off the chew!" I tried to hide my smirk.

"Skoal Marty, Skoal!" He spit again, this time hitting the can dead center.

"How'd you end up here Al-Bob?"

"Geez I hate this place. They were so behind with replacing the body parts of the dead that as soon as they put my head back on, they asked me to stay and take charge of quality control. I'm constantly fielding complaints and fixing fuck-ups." His phone rang and he held his pudgy little index finger to signal me that he needed to take the call. "Yea yea, I'm listening. Open your hole and give me the poop."

"You what? Listen, this is by no means a funny thing to do. I realize that you have a natural dislike for suicide bombers, but you can't be messin with their parts. Take his feet off of his arms and his hands off his legs and start over. I don't care! Just do it! Nobody's forgettin how you put that one camel jockey's dick on the end of his tongue. That was just plain gross...especially when he ran into that dead model, whats her name, and got a boner." He held his porky hand over his mouthpiece when he giggled. "Now do it!"

"Problem?"

"Naw, happens every day. I just sound like I'm pissed to expedite things." He looked at the ceiling and paused for a moment. "Anna Nicole Smith! That was that bitch's name! I don't care if those juggs were real or fake, I'd squeeze em!"

"Can you have fake boobs here?"

"Oh yea! If for no other reason it helps remind the men that they're in heaven." He held his paws up and made a squeezing motion. Everybody wins here Marty...everybody."

This was the first time since being in the room that I heard it was heaven. I didn't push the subject any further with Al-Bob, I didn't want to ask him why he was still a fat, sweaty, pig. It just wouldn't be nice.

"So, you gonna get yourself out of here and back to Louisville?" He reached into his desk and pulled out an old Egg McMuffin. I wondered how he was going to eat it with his mouth full of tobacco.

My brain filtered out the thought the same way you try to forget seeing a dead bird on the sidewalk.

"You better get a move-on! It's a long way from Tennessee to Louisville and you're supposed to be there tonight!"

"How did I get back to Tennessee?"

"Beats me." The phone rang and the finger went up again. "Hello, open your hole and...oh hello. Yea, he's right here. I'll tell him. Yes, sir!" He put the receiver down."Asshole!"

"Marty they need to see you in the garage. It seems they left out one of your parts the last time you were here."

"What part?"

"Have you checked yourself over lately? I don't know, probably something you don't ever use like an appendix or something. Just go through those doors, past the line of people waiting to get in the door marked "Service" and ask for a guy named Don." He pointed towards the big swinging doors as he spoke. "Hurry, times a wastin!"

As I nodded goodbye and walked towards the exit I could plainly see Al-Bob by using my 360 degree vision. He mouthed a word as I departed.

"Asshole." He said.

Chapter Seventy Two

2007-04-28T19:10:00.000-05:00

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I never did believe God was really talking with me on the computer. Well, maybe a little bit, but not completely. I have since spoken face to face with the creator of the universe and he assured me that he has never touched a computer. As a matter of fact he hates them. He says they are the work of the Devil. They are the tools of Red Skelton.

The person I was talking to was actually Thomas O'Brien from Novi Michigan, an unemployed graphic designer.

Sometime during the course of his life, Thomas accidentally discovered a way to speak to the dead using a modified Dell home computer. It had something to do when his Bichon Frise pet dog peed on his CPU as he was modifying his home network. He had thought about telling the world of his discovery and expanding the knowledge base of all of mankind, but changed his mind when he realized he could start screwing with the minds of dead people. He was just like most computer hackers that like to invent viruses and steal peoples personal information. Thomas O'Brien was a prick.

By the way...the name of the town "Novi" comes from the fact that it's exit number 6 on the Grand River toll road. No. VI. At least that's what most people believe. Actually, according to God, the toll road had not even been built when the town was named. Some say that it was the number 6 stop for the railroad, but the 5 stops before it didn't exist until several years after the town came into being.

According to God the town was originally named 666. It was the portal to eternal damnation. It was the veranda to evil. It was just outside of Detroit.

Thomas O'Brien is no longer alive. He died not many days after our computer conversation. A woman he had made acquaintance with in an internet chat room arranged to meet him at the Wilderness Lodge in the Wisconsin Dells. After a lovely day of wandering the amusement parks and bathing in the giant indoor swimming pool, she murdered him, cut him into steaks and cooked him on the grills provided by the hotel.

His mother still cares for his dog.

Chapter Seventy One

2007-03-10T21:05:00.000-06:00

C. Martin: I have so many questions

God#1: Here we go. Who am I ..the "Shell Answer Man"?

The Shell Answer Man was a running character in the commercials for the Shell gas station during the 1960's. It was a typical retort for people in my age bracket to use when someone asked you a bunch of ridiculous questions. God was making a joke for my demographic.

C. Martin: Why else would you be talking to me ?

God#1: Take it easy Judy. What do you want to know?

C. Martin: You're Judy

God#1: Yea Yea, go ahead and shoot.

C. Martin: What's the meaning of life?

God#1: What's you're favorite song?

I thought for a moment.

C. Martin: I have a bunch of favorite songs. What category, what artist?

God#1: Exactly. You can't name just one song. A guy like you probably has thousands of favorite songs. Same goes for the meaning of life. There are thousands of meanings.

C. Martin: OK, I get the point. Try this..why are we here?

God#1: Why is WHO here and WHERE are they at any particular moment ?

C. Martin: I've seen this movie! You're not God. If you were God you would give me specific answers instead of vague generalities like a newspaper horoscope. God would know the true singular meaning of life.

God#1: I'm really not trying to be vague. Sometimes I have trouble expressing myself. Let me just tell you that the meaning of life is always the question that people on Earth keep asking, when it's not really something that can be answered. It's not even the right question to ask me.

C. Martin: Then what should I ask?

God#1: Ask me what heaven is like.

C. Martin: I've seen heaven. It's like a beach on the Caribbean.

God#1: That wasn't heaven. That's just another place for people to gather until it's time for them to move on to heaven. It's no different that the place you thought was Hell. It's no different than the restaurant where you saw your guitar heroes. It's just like the place where your redneck girlfriend was. Everybody dies with expectations and we try to accommodate that until all the body parts catch up with the brains and people have a chance to discover their own way.

C.Martin: Why do dead people need bodies at all?

God#1: OK, here is one big misconception you people always have. The body is really important, the body is the one thing that separates you from all other beings. Everybody down there keeps talking about the "Soul" and how important it is and how it's the one thing that can't be defined.

C.Martin: The soul's not important????

God#1: Oh Hell no! Think of your computer as a human being. The box it's in is the body. The processor is the brain. The little miniature battery that keeps the time and date correct is the soul. Every fingerprint is different. Everyone has DNA that is distinctive. The veins in your eyeballs are as individually singular as a snowflake. The soul, on the other hand, is exactly the same in every person who has ever lived. I keep a giant bin full of them. If some body's soul falls out, and trust me, it happens all the time, we can drop another one in.

C.Martin: Has mine ever fallen out?

God#1: About 12 times.

C.Martin: Is that a lot?

God#1: You hold the record. It's the body parts we have trouble replacing. You lose a finger and your screwed! Suddenly you have to dial a phone with your foot. That's why we keep all the lost parts up here for people when they die, you REALLY need them all here!

C.Martin: Is that why Angels follow me around and protect me from harm?

God#1: Uhhhh. Angels?

C.Martin: Yes. I have thousands of Angels protecting me. They caught me when I fell off the bridge and took me down safely. I saw them flying above me in the woods. Black-eyed Angels.

God#1: Marty, there are no such things as Angels.

C.Martin: God! I SAW them!

God#1: ooh boy.

C.Martin: What????

God#1: Those are chickens Marty. The ghosts of the chickens you've eaten over your lifetime. They have an emotional investment in you.

C.Martin: Ghosts? There are ghosts? There are chicken ghosts?

God#1: Sometimes creatures, after getting their body parts back like to come back to Earth and roam around. I don't really understand it but it happens.

C.Martin: Where do they go after that?

God#1: You've seen it, you just didn't know that you saw it.

C. Martin: Here we go again.

God#1: Perplexing...isn't it?

C. Martin: Is Jesus your son?

God#1: Yes

C.Martin: Really?

God#1: Yes. Actually I've had two sons. Jesus is the famous one. I had another son in the early fifties who became a stand up comedian.

C. Martin: Red Skelton?

God#1: Oh God no! His name was Sonny Nippy. He worked the Borscht Belt circuit for a few years but never got on the Ed Sullivan show. He just didn't get the breaks, but he sure made me laugh.

C.Martin: I don't believe this.

God#1 Have faith my son.

C.Martin: Do you answer prayers?

God#1: I try to but people rarely pray. It's like Spam. Sometimes I get only a handful of prayers in a day and then sometimes I just get millions.

C.Martin: During major disasters and holidays?

God#1: No, usually when the lottery jackpot gets really big.

C.Martin: Is the Bible true?

God#1: Remember when President Reagan's daughter wrote that book about a family living in the White House and the press asked him if it was true?

C.Martin: Not really.

God#1: He ducked under the roaring blades of the Presidential helicopter and said "Interesting..."and then he put his beautiful 2 front teeth on his lips for emphasis and said "FFFFICTION!"

C.Martin: So it's not true?

God#1: Never said that.

C.Martin: Here we go again. Do you ever smite people?

God#1: Sure! I love smiting. I once smote a guy just for snoring.

C.Martin: Do you cause disasters?

God#1: Do you mean do I cause earthquakes and floods?

C.Martin: yes

God#1: Not directly. You ever try to cut your own hair?

C.Martin: What?

God#1: You cut a little here and a little there and then you notice it's all lopsided... so you cut a little more here and the next thing you know you look like you walked into a moving fan?

C.Martin: Not really. Have you?

God#1: Not personally, but I saw it happen on an episode of "Sister,Sister" once. It was a disaster!

C.Martin: Is any of what you've been telling me the truth?

God#1:It doesn't really matter to you right now. What you need to know is that you are going to have to make it back to Earth and figure out how to survive

C.Martin: That's easy. I'm rich and famous.

God#1: You're broke, alone, and hated. Look in your pockets. What you have in there is what you have. Your agent Cy was kidnapped and killed, but before he died he signed over everything you own. You don't even have that crappy little condo anymore.

C. Martin: Who killed Cy? Why am I hated? Where will I go?

God#1: There you go! Now THOSE are the questions you should be asking!

C.Martin: What's the answer?

God#1: How should I know? I'm just a 14 year old girl from Ames, Iowa.... BRB

"BRB" is computer-speak for Be Right Back. People say that in chat rooms when they have to go take a pee or get a sandwich or decide they're finished talking to you but they don't want to say "goodbye."

I waited for about twenty minutes before I got up and left. The screen saver of the burning bush had come back on and flickered on the walls of the cubicle.

Chapter Seventy

2007-03-05T17:10:00.000-06:00

Eddie, the restaurant server with the super-numeral teeth was kneeling on the chest of my brain surgeon, Dr. Granger, pressing the barrel of an antique colt .45 revolver into his widely flared left nostril.

My ex-wife Carol was blithering hysterically.

"You wanna tell your white bitch to shut the fuck up?" Eddie pushed the gun even further into Granger's nose.

"Where are you from? I think I recognize that accent." Granger's voice sounding like he had a cold. "You're a Yella Hammer, aren't cha?"

"Shut UP porch monkey! I should kill you right now!" Eddie's face, already full of broken blood vessels turned even redder. "I hate you racist Niggers."

"Yellow Hammer." Granger was defiant.

Eddie pulled back the black hammer of the pistol and the revolving chamber, full of bullets, rotated one click. His index finger squeezed the trigger, moving it a millimeter towards blowing Granger's brains out.

"You don't know shit! Just cos I'm from Alabama don't make me a Yellow Hammer. That kind of name calling is just totally uncalled for you stupid Jungle Bunny." Eddie's hand was quivering.

"Honey, stop making him angry." Carol screeched from across the room.

"Yea BOY! Maybe you shouldn't make the Yellow Hammer angrier than he already is!"

"I could fix that face of yours you know. I have a Dentist friend that could work on that God-awful mouth. By the time I'm finished with you, people would never guess that your sister is your mother." Granger was fearless.

Eddie tried to speak but instead of words, spit came flying from his mouth and dribbled down his chin. He pulled the gun out of Granger's nose and put it back in, he pulled it out and put it back in, he pulled it out and shoved it in hard again. He was trying to scare the Doctor as much as he could but Granger wasn't playing the game.

"You wanna die Nigger!"

"You're either going to shoot me or you gonna let me live. I have the feeling that if you were going to kill me you would've pulled the trigger by now. You want something from me and it's my guess that you want it enough to let me live. Am I right?" Granger's voice never wavered.

"Honey. what's a Yellow Hammer?" Carol was a little calmer thanks to her lover's confidence. Her sense of well-being was short lived when Eddie pulled the gun out of Granger's nose and pointed it at her.

"I don't need you bitch. I could kill you right now and not blink a fucking eye." As he pointed the gun at Carol he tried to stare directly into her eyes in order to make his point. Sadly his eyes didn't always work in concert and she wasn't sure exactly where he was looking. She quickly glanced over her shoulder to see if someone was standing behind her.

Eddie was very angry and starting to hiccup wildly. That was a good way to spot a Yellow Hammer. Some distinct, hereditary flaw not only left their skin jaundiced, but it made them unable to encounter stress without the little, involuntary spasms called hiccups. That's how they got their nickname.

In the region of Eddie's upbringing, the land of the suspected parent, there was a bird that was prevalent in the forests and garbage dumps. It was the yellow headed woodpecker. It banged it's head wildly against trees and pipes and anything it believed held the nectar of the burrowing insect. The noise it made echoed through the hills both day and night. Sometimes it would drive it's beak into the tin covered roofs of the hill people. The occupants would get so upset that they would begin to hiccup. The ensuing concert of banging and burping mutants became known as the Yellow Hammer Concerto.

The nickname of the bird became the nickname of the mutants. The Yellow Hammer.

The jerking reaction of the hiccuping caused Eddie's colt pistol to fire. The bullet went through the door of Dr. Granger's suite. They all paused and stared at the door as they heard the sound of a body dropping to the floor in the hall outside.

The silence in the room lasted for a short time, all eyes flashing to one another.

Eddie was angry and frightened. "See what you made me AYYYEEECK do!"

Chapter Sixty Nine

2007-02-24T11:32:00.000-06:00

One hour earlier I was still in the dark. I was afraid to the point of insanity and everything hurt. Everything! Something was pulling at my man parts and I couldn't make it stop.

"God! Why hast thou forsaken me?" I know that sounds overly dramatic, but put yourself in my position. I had run out of people to blame. I had stolen this line from the refrain of a song that Jesus performed when I was in Redneck Heaven. It really got the crowd going.

As I screamed, my arms and hands flailed in the darkness and banged against the walls. I straightened them out and pushed against my prison of blackness. Something brushed the palm of my hand, something embedded in the wall that had a shape and contour. Both of my hands surrounded it and studied it like a blind man reading braille. A slotted screw caught my fingernail. A hard, piercing, nipple-like structure grabbed my attention and I fondled it madly. It started to move upward and then with an earth shattering, mentally devastating, visually crushing buzz, everything went white.

I believed that I had found the great white light that draws all dying souls to heaven. I was at the eye of the Godly beacon that sends warmth and assurance to the frightened and broken dead.

Then, as my eyes began to adjust, I noticed the ceiling tiles.

Recessed fluorescent lighting, the kind that my ex-wife Cynthia felt should be banned from the face of the Earth because the way it made her skin look and because it was created by grinding up the souls of the dead. Right now it was better than the Sun to me.

It's funny how things seem when you're in the dark compared to what they really are when the light switch has been flicked on. I was in a room full of file cabinets. What I thought was a crazy tomb of insanity was actually a maze of double-wide storage chests and I was wedged into a corner created by the Steelcase file cabinet company.

I looked down and saw a human hand on my crotch. I recognized the class ring. It was Louis' hand.

"Louis you fag!" I grabbed the arm, below the wrist and it let go. I found the partially open file cabinet with the name "Tooth, Louis" typed on white cardboard inserted into the identification slot. I stuffed the roaming arm inside and shut the drawer.

Curiosity caused me to open a few more of the cabinets. They were filled with body parts. This was the place were all the lost limbs were waiting. I was thinking about my father and the countless organs and pieces that had been taken from him before he passed away. His file cabinet must have been enormous.

I maneuvered my way through the gray, unorganized maze until I found myself in a large, even grayer room of office cubicles. It looked like the worlds most boring insurance headquarters. It was very much like the accountants office of Foote, Carp, and Thor that I'd worked for so many years.

There were hundreds of work stations, each one with a computer and family photos on the desk. There were staplers and boxes of paper clips neatly arranged on top. The only thing missing was the people.

My heartbeat was all I could hear.

Among all of the desks that I passed, one had a screen saver of a small, bushy plant engulfed in flames. As I got nearer to it, I could hear the computer making the crackling sound of a fireplace. Something about it drew me to sit in front of it.

The screen cleared and an instant message screen from Yahoo came up.

God#1: Marty!!!!!

The visual message was followed by an audible. "Ding Dong!"

I answered.

C.Martin: Who is this?

God#1: Marty, it's me, God! :)

C.Martin: Really?

God#1: Of course. Can't you read my screen name?

C. Martin: That really doesn't mean very much, you know.

God#1: But it says right there.. God. Who else would have an ID like that?

C.Martin: This is IM chat. About a million other people.

God#1: That's why it says #1 , so you would know it's the real God.

C.Martin: Anybody can do that. How is a rational person to believe this is really God? For all I know you could be a 14 year old girl named Judy from Ames, Iowa with a terrible sense of self.

God#1: Then your God would be a 14 year old girl named Judy.

C. Martin: If you are truly the Lord Almighty then give me a sign.

God#1: Like a magic trick? I think you know better than that Marty!

C. Martin: Why don't you just appear to me?

God#1: I am appearing to you....via the Internet. Isn't it wonderful?

C. Martin: Why don't you appear to me in your physical form here in the room?

God#1: I'd like to but the room's not big enough for me. We couldn't both fit in there.

C.Martin You're not that large, I met you when I visited heaven. You looked pretty average to me then.

God#1: That wasn't me Marty. That was a guy that I let pretend is me sometimes when people need a little encouragement or a good scolding. He is actually a television executive from CBS in Chicago, Illinois.

C.Martin:That wasn't God?

God#1: Oh good lord Marty! Did you see his shoes?

Chapter Sixty Eight

2007-02-19T18:19:00.000-06:00

I was staring at my receipt for the "Healthy, Breaded, Cod sandwich" that I was eating while sitting in the window at Moby Dick's on Shelbyville road in Louisville, Kentucky. One Cod dinner, Fried Okra side,and one large Diet...$ 7.99. When I reached into my pocket to pay for the meal I realized I had no money. All I could find was the hand of a dead monkey. The lady at the register smiled and said "That will do just fine!" and gave me my receipt.

I was staring at the words at the bottom of the receipt. It had only been an hour since I was trapped in total darkness with something clamped to my crotch. It had only been a half hour since I talked directly to God. It was just 2 hours away from all hell breaking loose. It was 4 hours from when I would meet the planet's greatest Fabulist, Aesop, in person, and discover the true meaning of my life.

I was sitting in the window below the neon sign in the window at Moby Dick's. As Jim Morrison once crooned, "The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes, the street lights share their hollow glow, your brain seems bruised with numb surprise, still one place to go."

The sign above my head was buzzing and flashing red. It said "Now Frying". If you were on the street looking in at me, if you could see the look in my eyes, you would imagine that the sign was referring to my brains.

I was staring at the words at the bottom of the receipt. They were printed in red italics, just below the bold letters that spoke "Thank you...Come again!"

Up until now I had never realized how much I hated the printed words "Thank you!" Fast food restaurants put them on their receipts and the doors of their trash bins. It was frequently embossed on the door handles as you pushed your way out into the street. Sometimes it was printed on urinal cakes in the Men's room. It's like saying "You pigs are all the same to us, we will thank you even if we didn't notice you were alive. We have printed it out for you to read so we won't have to waste the breath it takes to speak it. We don't care if you made a mess, or caused a disturbance, or left without paying, we still thank you! In the case of the urinal cake..We don't even care if you piss on us...Thank you!"

If I had flown into a rage and hacked the lady at the cash register to tiny bits, packed her inside a Hefty bag and shoved her bone and sinew and dripping intestines through the little swinging door of the trash bin, it would have responded with a "Thank you!" and off and away I would go with a smile on my face.

The words printed below, in red italics, made up for the insulting nature of the "Thank you..Come again!" I have never been so affected by the printed word in my life, as far as I can remember.

Perhaps it was because my brain was indeed frying. I was trapped in a world filled with people and lights and cars and 360 degree vision. It was all coming at me so fast and foreboding. My heart was pounding and my skin was wet with perspiration. I must have been quite the sight. My face bruised and scraped. My eyes black and blue. Dried blood below my nose.

This could only happen once in a person's existence. Maybe it could only happen to me. Have you ever found yourself sitting in the window at Moby Dick's in Louisville, bruised and battered, seeing in all directions at once, a "Now Frying" sign lit up above your head, eating a Codfish sandwich that you paid for with the hand of a recently deceased primate after having just spoken to the creator of the universe?

This is why I was staring at the words at the bottom of the receipt. This is why Babe sent me here. This is why God arranged to have me delivered to Shelbyville road. This is why I went ahead and walked right by the Kentucky Fried Chicken store and hopped and skipped into the Blue and White festooned Moby Dick's.

There at the bottom of the receipt. In red italicized letters it said:

You are the most important person in the World!!

Chapter Sixty Seven

2007-02-10T18:13:00.000-06:00

Oprah ran through the door like he knew where he was. He jumped on the bed and laid his head on the pillow and shut his eyes. Russell flopped down next to him and kicked off his shoes and grabbed the television remote.

Bob wandered into the bathroom to find Katrina, the housekeeper, standing on her knees atop the vanity with her ear attached to the bottom of a glass pressed against the wall.

Bob's eyes became very large behind his coke bottle lenses. He spun his head to inform Russell that someone was in the bathroom. He parted his lips but no words came out. He looked back at Katrina and smiled largely. He let out a little snort.

Across the hall a little man with two sets of teeth in his mouth was knocking on the door. It was the waiter from the restaurant where Dr. Granger and my ex wife Carol had eaten earlier in the day. Granger had left his credit card at the restaurant.

Ed was doing his civic duty by finding the owner of the card and returning it to him in his free time. He also bought a tank of gas for his customized Astro Van and 16 boxes of 12 gauge shotgun shells with it on the drive over.

Granger was upset at first. "Hey, aren't you a waiter from the restaurant this afternoon? How did you make your way to my room?"

"Got yur credit card here Boonie boy." He flipped the card up between his bony, yellow fingers like it was a switchblade knife.

"Boonie Boy? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Nuthin...that's just a dee-rogatory term for Nigger where I come from."

Granger grabbed Eddie by the collar, yanked him off of his feet, pulled him into the room and shut the door. As Katrina exited Russell and Bob's room she heard the noises coming from across the hall. She flattened her skirt down and buttoned her blouse. She considered grabbing a glass from her cleaning cart and listening in to what was going on, but after what had happened between her and Bob, she felt that perhaps she should just keep moving.

In the next suite down, Coach Butcher was lying on the floor, naked, his hands, legs, and mouth wrapped in silver duct tape. 3 men, who looked as if they could somehow be related to Eddie, were taking turns shocking him in the hip with a cattle prod. They were prepping him for the next step, a Taser gun.

Chapter Sixty Six

2007-02-10T11:35:00.000-06:00

Louis Tooth lay prone on the bed, staring up at the ceiling in the luxurious suite at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. Something had startled him from a deep slumber and he was floating somewhere between sleep and consciousness.

Lisa was in the bathroom, holding Louis' prosthetic arm under the water rushing from the golden swan necked faucet over the sink. She was rubbing hotel soap on the fingers and scrubbing it as hard as she could.

Earlier they checked into their room together and Louis used the bathroom and dropped his arm off on the Louis XIV chair in the corner of the expansive lounge. He plopped into bed and passed out cold, much to the dismay of Lisa who emerged from the closet just moments later, dressed in a skimpy ensemble, ready for action. Not a cough nor a gentle nudge could wake the snoring Louis. She went back into the bath.

Lisa had never looked that closely at Louis' faux limb before and having noticed it in the chair, she picked it up and studied it carefully.

Gazing in the mirror she was at first shaken by how real the arm looked in her hands and how the hand appeared to be reaching for her left breast. She opened her top and placed the palm of the device on her bosom letting her nipple pop out from between the fingers.

She had once tried a masturbation technique called "The Stranger" that she read about in Penthouse Magazine. It begins by sitting on your own hand until it falls asleep and then using this numb appendage to touch yourself, giving the feeling of being groped by someone else. It had never worked for Lisa, largely because of the tingling pain involved and because the blood would rush back into her nerve endings, long before the job was complete.

Fondling her breast with the prosthesis was interesting and the image in the mirror exhilarating. The hand worked its way down her chest to her belly button and the index finger gently circled around the diamond stud. Slowly the cool digits made their way even further down.

Her reflection went from intriguing to bizarre as the empty, socket end with its straps and harness came into view, so she turned her back on the mirror.

Soon she was briskly riding the artificial limb like a hobby horse. Her face contorted and her lungs gasping for breath. She raised herself up on to the marble vanity with one foot on the lid of the toilet seat and the other stretched out to brace itself on the rim of the bathtub so she could get a better angle.

The room grew dim and her mind left the Earth to those places that only a woman can locate during an intimate encounter. Part of her thoughts stayed inside the room, causing her to bite her lip, squelching any sounds of ecstasy.

It wasn't her climax or even the fall off of the vanity onto the hard tile floor that caused the blood curdling screams that woke Louis from his extremely deep slumber. It wasn't the bulk of Louis' prosthetic hand being unexpectedly shoved deep inside her vagina that made her howl like a Basset hound to a full moon, prompting the house keeper next door to take the cellophane from the drinking glass sitting on the vanity in the adjoining bathroom and hold it against the wall while pressing her own ear to the bottom just to better hear what was happening. It had mostly to do with the large prosthetic thumb penetrating another orifice that was innocently hanging around in the general vicinity of the crime.

After Lisa had pulled the Stranger's hand out of her ass she sat, slightly confused on the cold tile. She stared at the disembodied arm that lay before her with an odd glare. It was a combination of shame and anger mixed with love. It was almost as if she were wondering what the mystery limb was thinking after having its way with her. If there was a cigarette handy, she would've smoked it.

"Lisa?" Louis called from the next room. He was still not completely awake. "Lisa, are you here?"

Lisa quickly sprang to her feet, winced a bit, grabbed the arm and started scrubbing. She concentrated on the thumb.

It was a frequent occurrence that when Louis would make an acquaintance while wearing the prosthetic arm, the stranger would unwittingly grab the dead hand and shake it only to lose the comforting smile on his or her face and begin apologizing, almost always repeating the mantra "I didn't know, I didn't realize, I'm so sorry."

Lisa was concerned that if she didn't completely sterilize the hand under the scalding tap that any hapless, fake-hand shaker might come away with some offensive smells along with the feelings of embarrassment they would indubitably be left with.

"LISA!" Louis was becoming more awake. "Where are you?"

Lisa held the hand up to her nose. "Coming Louis." She gave the "That should be good enough" shrug and tossed the arm back on to the chair as she left the water closet.

"What's the matter honey?" She said as she tried to regain her composure.

"I had the strangest dream." Louis elevated his pillow and sat up in the beautiful, hand carved, mahogany, 4 poster bed. "I was trapped in the dark and I reached out..."

"Yes honey..." Lisa slid her damp hand behind Louis' shoulder.

"I reached out and I touched Marty..."

"That's kind of beautiful Louis."

"No." Louis swallowed hard. "I touched Marty."

"You touched Marty..yes." Lisa was becoming worried.

"I touched Marty's...dick!"

"Yewwwww. What a horrible dream." Lisa recoiled in horror.

"It was so real!" Louis stared out towards the window at the Louisville skyline. Night had fallen and the city lights filled the room. The landing beacon from a jet aircraft moved slowly across the otherwise frozen portrait of the River City.

A steamboat, the Belle of Louisville was churning the Ohio river water up in its giant, red, paddle wheel, making a 90 degree turn in order to mate with its landing pier. The steam whistles blew loudly, the sound bouncing off of the buildings and echoing down the vacant city streets. She was announcing her arrival.

"I'm home!" Was what the Belle was saying.

Chapter Sixty Five

2007-02-05T17:57:00.000-06:00

You should really get injured when you tumble down a long flight of stairs and don't get me wrong, I was pretty banged up, but not nearly as bad as if I'd known I was going to be falling down a flight of stairs. If you stand atop a monstrously long staircase and fear that someone is about to push you down them, your muscles become tense and you would stick your hands out to break the fall causing your injuries to be severe. I, on the other hand, rolled for what seemed twenty minutes over tread after tread like I was falling into a soft, cozy bed, only to spring right to my feet at the bottom.

At least I believed I was at the bottom.

It was so overwhelmingly dark down there that it hurt my eyes to try and see. My 360 degree vision allowed me to look in all directions at one time and nothing is what I saw. My first mistake was walking without knowing where I was or where I was going. Blindly feeling my way, I became trapped in a corner with no sense of direction and no escape. Every time I would try to move forward or to retrace my steps I would bang into a wall. The brightest things in the place were the stars in my head when I slammed into something.

The more I moved it seemed the smaller my world became. The wall came faster and the pain of whacking against it more intense. The futility of it all drew tears. I even tried to give up at one point but the room wouldn't let me. I couldn't lay down without taking a blow to the chin. I couldn't stay in one place without the wall hitting me from behind.

Thinking became impossible. The sounds of concussion can drown out the little voice that tells you what to do.

The little voice would say "Turn around and go back!" BOOM. My forehead met resistance. "Try inching forward!" BOOM. The back of my head would crack. "Stay where you are!" Boom. My nose would start to bleed.

I wanted to take a minute and contemplate how I got there. I wanted to guess where I was. I wanted to be free of this prison. The frustration was intolerable, there was no place to hide, nowhere to land.

I held my hand up to my face to see if I could somehow make it visible. The wall pushed my palm into my mouth. I spit it out and the wall put it right back in.

Time lost all meaning to me. Just like the fall down the stairs it may have only lasted a second or it might have been two and a half years.

A woman's voice called to me. "Come this way Marty."

I took a step in the direction of the sound and the wall didn't strike. "This must be the way." I thought to myself and I began to step briskly in the direction of the sound. Within seconds I bashed my brains out on the wall again.

A different voice called. "No Marty, come this way." Two steps and I was feeling home free until I found myself back in the corner.

Another voice, different from the first two called. "Go back the way you came Marty!" I couldn't move. I was afraid of what would surely come next.

The first voice said. "Don't be afraid to do what you have to do Marty, it's going to hurt right now but in the long run it'll pay off."

The second voice spoke in a dejected tone. "If you think it's the right thing to do then go ahead, I won't stop you."

The third female voice sounded angry. "If you want to stay there for the rest of eternity then keep doing what you're doing. You have the power to change what's happening but its your choice to not even try. If you want to stay, mired down in your own little cesspool, then that's your choice. You are weak."

Somehow I took that as a pep talk that wasn't really working. I didn't put the walls there. I didn't choose to be plunged into black. If I could see myself I would probably be alarmed at the cuts and bruises that I had. "Thank God for the darkness!" I assured myself.

If being trapped in a total void and hearing voices wasn't bad enough, something terrible began crawling up my legs. My imagination ran wild. It felt like a combination of spiders and the cold, bony fingers of death. It surrounded my calves and slithered up to my thighs. It stopped at my crotch and refused to go any further. I tried to push it off of Mr. Happy but my hands couldn't make a difference.

I was cold and frightened. I had nowhere to go. Death had an icy grip on my manhood.

Chapter Sixty Four

2007-02-03T09:01:00.000-06:00

"Are we go-eeng to Woo-A-Vul?" Bob asked in a very loud voice to Russell. He smiled a giant smile that changed quickly into a look of distress and back to a fresh smile in a period of 10 seconds. His question was greeted with silence.

Bob sat in the front passenger seat of Russell's SUV while Oprah lay stretched out on the bench seat behind him. Russell was staring straight ahead with his fists clenched tightly near the top of the steering wheel. His knuckles were white. His one good eye was darting left and right while his glass one stayed where it was.

A road sign stating "Louisville 30 miles" in giant sized letters came and went.

Bob queried, once again, in a loud voice. "Are we go-eeng to Woo-A-Vul?"

"YES WE ARE GOING TO LOUISVILLE! WE ARE GOING TO LOUISVILLE! WE ARE GOING TO LOUISVILLE!" Russell was not good at keeping his patience with Bob. It wasn't the first time Bob had asked him that question during the trip.

"Goody!" said Bob.

"I bought you a giant book of expert Soduko puzzles to work Bob, why don't you try solving them for a while?" Russell barked.

Bob held up the book and leafed the pages in Russell's face. "I finished it Wussel! See?" The demonstrative way in which Bob showed the pages to Russell blocked his vision momentarily and he swerved across the highway as he batted the puzzle book away from his eye.

"Bob! Don't DO that!" Russell's heart was racing. The hearts of all the drivers he swerved in front of were racing too. People honked their horns and some stuck their hands out of the windows, giving Russell the "finger" to show their dismay. Russell tried to look straight ahead and suffer his indignity.

Bob answered back to the disgruntled travellers with an enormous smile, an animated wave and a hearty "Heeewooooo!!!!"

"Roll up your window please, Bob." Russell said in the calmest voice he could make come out of his giant, volcanic interior.

"Heeeewooo!!!" Shouted Bob.

Oprah awoke, tilted his head and perked his ears. A giant question mark above his brow could easily be imagined. God has given Dogs the ability to speak without words and Oprah was saying what everyone else was thinking. "What the fuck?"

"Why awre we go-eeeng to Woo-A-bill Russell?

"Because Marty's agent called me and told me that we needed to meet Marty at a hotel there. That Marty really wanted us to be there with him."

"Mahtee has an ageent?" These questions had also been asked repeatedly.

"Yes Bob, Marty has an agent."

"Whatd is dis ageents name, Wusso?"

"Cy."

"Ahhhhhhhh." said Bob.

"Why do you keep saying Ahhhh, when I say Cy, Bob? It sounds like you're sigh........never mind." Russell hit himself on the head. It had taken Russell about 50 of these question and answer sessions to figure out what Bob was doing when he heard the name Cy.

Russell wished he was somewhere else. He had even wished he was dead at one point, but he changed his mind after he considered how he wasn't totally prepared to die.

He had tried to play a Country and Western radio station for about 20 minutes but could no longer stand to hear Bob singing along at the top of his lungs. Bob knew all the words to all the songs, probably. It was most likely going to take another 40 minutes until they reached the hotel and Russell was suffering in seconds, not minutes.

"Are we doe-eeng to Voo-A-Bill?"

"Why yes Bob" Russell said calmly. "Yes we are." He tried to imagine the splendor of the Brown Hotel, a legendary Louisville charm piece in the heart of the near south. Room service, hot towels, and 5 star dining. A smile crossed his face. In- room television with Spectravision, the best in pornographic movies. Spank-o-vision! A mini bar. A Concierge. Spectravision.

"Ahre we gooo-ong to Wou-Eh-......"

"Yes Bob, we are."

Chapter Sixty Three

2007-01-30T14:58:00.000-06:00

"Nothing is as it seems!" Shouted Red Skelton.

"Blow me!" I shouted back. It struck me that while the Babe lay crying on the ground and his lit cigar was burning a hole in his jersey, and while a beaten and mangled Lou Gehrig faded off into the woods, and as a half-dog/all-dead vaudeville comedian stood before me with a soul eating grin on his face, that I had seen a skunk having sex with a black cat. I think that somewhere I had heard that this could be an omen of the apocalypse or perhaps a Pepe La Pew cartoon gone wrong.

"Good point." Red calmly spoke. "God bless it!"

I laughed a little.

"It just seemed like something I should say at a time like this. You know, like in the movies."

I was still mad but a little tickled. "What is this obsession you dead people seem to have with the movies anyway?"

"People relate to movies much better than to real situations. They find movies to be more real than real life, they can understand them. They watch them." Red lifted his leg to the bush he'd been hiding behind and peed on it.

"So people don't watch their own lives?"

"Not exactly. They only glimpse at it as it passes them by. After it's over they scratch their nuts and say "Oh Yea..now I see. That's what that was all about. I thought I was paying attention, but I missed it!""

I kind of envied Red not having to unzip his pants and hide somewhere to pee. What freedom!

"It's like when you take a poop." Now Red was moving to number 2. "Stay with me here." He held his palms up, facing each other, making the traditional public speaker's hand gesture to indicate that one should pay special attention. He didn't realize that he had me when he lifted his leg to the tree.

"I'm listening."

"When you get up from the toilet after a pinching a big Hayooja you always turn around and give it a little glance before you flush. You don't really look at it... you don't stare..you don't pick it apart...you just sort of glance back to make sure that something did IN FACT come out of you and no matter what it was you go ahead and flush it as soon as you possibly can. Later in the day, long after your poopy is long gone, an image of what you saw might flash in your thoughts. You will think that maybe you missed something, that your memory is telling you that you might have seen that jackknife you lost when you were camping with Uncle Roy, or a piece of your colon was in there...whatever."

I was becoming aware that my mind was starting to wander. I thought about how cute it sounded when he said the word "poopy". He was a naturally charming fellow.

"You looked but you didn't look. You might've seen something important, but you'll never know for sure what it was. If it were a movie you could take it home and put it on the DVD and freeze it and play it back in slow motion. You could show it to your friends."

"Why would you want to show your poop to your friends?"

"Are you missing the point or are you just being a smart ass?" Red's tail wagged with agitation.

"Sorry." I was being a smart ass.

"Your whole life is like that. Things happen to you every moment of every day and you glimpse at it and flush it away and later when you're older and sadder and lonely you start remembering things like your poo was gold and filled with nuts made of diamonds. Instead of flushing it you wished that you reached down into that toilet and scooped it up with your hands and showed it to the world, and given it as a gift to your girlfriend...or significant other for Valentine's day."

"Don't bring up Valentine's day, I would rather go ahead and flush that away."

"Whatever, god bless it." Red hopped towards me and wrapped his arms about my shoulders. "Maybe there is a better analogy, trust me, people never remember ordinary poops, but they always remember when they're used as an example."

"I'll keep that close to me forever." Even though I was being a smart ass again, Red smiled and scratched his left leg with his right.

"You'll remember that special Christmas morning or that fabulous babe in the see through nightie you met at the hotel, or the words of a song that touched your heart and made you do something crazy, but you'll cleanse the glance from a stranger that needed your help from your memory only to call it up again when it's too late. In the movies, that glance would play out with that song that you love, in double slow motion, and done by a really attractive actress....in a nightie!" Red was getting noticeably excited, I was starting to wish he had pants.

"OK, so what you're saying is, movies are better than real life?"

"No, I'm saying that movies are easier to understand, prettier, and you can walk away from them whenever you please. I'm saying that what's truly important to you doesn't always reach up and grab your patootie." He stopped to smell the phony flower in his lapel.

I think he was the only person I ever met that could say "patootie" and I wouldn't hit him with a steamroller.

"AND you get popcorn...and that makes your bowels move...and if you look closely, you'll see the kernels in your poopy."

"You really like talking shit, don't you?" I was starting to get annoyed. "How do I know that you're just not talking a line of....POOPY to me like you did to Babe Ruth? How do I know that this is not just another tall tale told by an emissary of Satan himself?"

"You don't." He said calmly. He moved his hands to my shoulders and with a toothless smile, he pushed me with great force down a flight of stairs that had suddenly appeared behind me. A flight of stairs in the woods. Imagine that.

Chapter Sixty Two

2007-01-28T11:01:00.000-06:00

The top of the Devil box exploded open, wood and metal flying. Satan, his arms outstretched, howled with the volume of an angry lover. His body quivered violently and his ominous teeth bared, revealing bloody gums and crap from two thousand floss-free years. Several of his fingers were shortened or missing entirely.

Babe Ruth searched frantically for his baseball bat and shifted so quickly in his chair that it snapped shut like a mouse trap folding him in half.

Standing in front of the box I pulled back my fist, elbow locked and drawn back, looking like a catcher getting ready to throw out a runner stealing second base. "Relax!" I said to the Devil. All I wanted was for things to be quiet for a few moments while I contemplated what Babe had told me and figure out why I was so angry. My fist knocked Satan down and out. The punch was so hard that even the little yellow birds that would normally circle his head fell to the bottom of the wooden prison and passed out from the trauma. Little tiny stars floated around their heads.

"Shut this box up and fix the God Damn thing!" I didn't even look at Babe as I walked away, but I saw him anyway. He scrambled partly on hands and knees until he could gather enough steam to stand erect.

I walked on into the woods...seeing red...in 360 degrees.

Babe Ruth was screaming at me from the clearing. "Marty, where are you going? What are you going to do?

"Kiss my ass Babe!"

"Marty! What are you going to tell the people?" He was now running after me

"I'm going to tell them to kiss my ass." In my anger, I started seeing things for what they were. I was seeing the details of everything, for miles, in all directions.

I saw a tree that looked like a spindly hand that beckoned me to approach when the wind made it move. I saw that the birds above the forest were actually the black-eyed angels that caught me when I fell from the bridge. I saw a skunk having sex with a black cat. I saw Red Skelton crouching behind a woodland bush.

Babe screamed. "Marty, I won't let you go off half-cocked!" He hurled his Louisville Slugger in my direction and it broke to splinters on a tree trunk just inches from my head. "Uh oh." He lamented.

I spun on my heels to face him. His face was ashen in embarrassment and disbelief. Over his shoulder the box was rocking and starting to splinter.

"How am I going to save the world from the Devil now?" Both of the Bambino's hands held his face and his cigar fell to the ground.

"Maybe you should ask Clem Kadiddlefucker over there." I pointed to the rustling bush a hundred yards away.

Red stood up and brushed his tie with his paint stained hands.

"There's the Devil." I said pointing to Red Skelton "I don't know what that is in the box, but your Devil is standing right here."

Red's face widened with a broad smile that somehow passed the message of delight without showing any teeth. He walked from behind the bush. The bottom half of his body was unclothed and appeared to be the lower half of a German Shepherd. He walked on his tip toes as uncomfortably as any creature that was created to use all fours.

"You don't belong here Marty, you are aware of that aren't you?" His voice as kind and sweet and a Mother lilting to a newborn. "You need to be going."

"Red, tell him that's the Devil and we've got to keep him in the box!" Babe cried.

"Go ahead Red, tell the Babe that you're not the Devil." My voice was echoing through the clearing. "Tell him that he's been serving mankind for all these years. Tell him more lies!"

"The Devil doesn't lie Marty, Satan can't lie. It's like when a prostitute asks a prospective client if he's a policeman or not, he has to tell her, it's the law." Red was very serious about this.

"But you lied to the Babe. You told him that was Satan in the box!"

"Sure, I lied, but I'm not the Devil. Not exactly, anyway." His feet crossed and uncrossed nervously.

Babe Ruth was perplexed. He was starting to realize that he hadn't been guarding the Prince of Darkness all these years. He was scratching his head madly to try and understand what he was witnessing. "If that isn't the Devil, then who or what is that in the box?"

Red shuffled anxiously.

"Tell him Red. He deserves to know." I was suddenly in command of the situation.

"Lou Gehrig." Red mumbled.

The box fell open and the mangled body of the "Iron Horse" stepped out and sauntered into the darkness of the woods.

"God Bless!" Red shouted in the direction of the retreating Gehrig.

Chapter Sixty One

2006-12-19T19:25:00.000-06:00

"It' s all Mother Nature...She hates you." Babe Ruth held up his hand in a stopping motion and walked away from me and towards the box.

I watched him walk all the way around me without moving my head. I saw every step. At the same time I mentally squinted to see the flocks of birds flying above. They were barely visible because of the dense foliage and contrast between the dark forest and brilliant sky.

Babe walked behind the box to find Satan had pushed a small opening in the rear, his Devilish hand crawling as if it had eyes, as if it were searching for a better escape plan. The Bambino reached in his back pocket and produced a very large, shiny, meat cleaver. His attack on the Prince of Darkness was obscured by the box, but I did see a swift, downward thrust, followed by a terrible scream.

"Everything OK?" I chewed hard on my lower lip as I asked the question.

Babe was repairing the hole in the box with an endless assortment of tools he pulled from his pants. It reminded me of the television version of "Batman" when the Caped Crusader would pull anything he needed at the appropriate time from his Utility Belt. I have always wondered how such an overweight man could be such an incredible baseball player and now I think I figured it out. He wasn't overweight at all! He was carrying everything he would ever need beneath his uniform.

The King of the homers walked back to where I was waiting. He had the long purple/orange index finger of the Devil in his hand. "Its all good!"

He stuck the digit from hell that was slowly turning brown into the opening of a cigar cutter. Once it was in, past the fingernail, he chopped it cleanly. He eyed the finger from both sides and then slid it under his nose. The cigar that was in his mouth dropped to the ground next to the Devil's fingernail. Before any words could leave my open mouth he shoved the decapitated finger into his lips and lit it with the Nascar lighter.

"What you poor confused people see as "Natural" in your natural lives, is exactly what's stopping you from getting anything accomplished. It's exactly what's keeping you from realizing your potential."

"Isn't living and loving part of God's plan for us? Doesn't he challenge us to make us stronger? Stronger to do his will?" I don't know where this philosophy was coming from, I must have gone to church at some point in my life. I think I'm a Methodist.

"Marty, don't confuse God with Nature. God built us so he could enjoy watching us. We're like television for him. He made a couple of humans and that was plenty entertainment for him. He created Nature to tend the gardens and keep the whole Eco-system in check. Think of the world as a fish tank and Nature is the snail you buy to eat all the crap off of the glass."

"So which is it, a TV or a fish tank?"

Babe blew a puff of purple/orange smoke from his lips "Ha!" he chortled. "Go fick yourself!" I was feeling as if he had lost interest in me for a moment. "God wanted nothing more than to watch A&E."

"Arts and Entertainment?"

"Adam and Eve." He pulled a folding chair out of nowhere, snapped it into shape and slid his bottom down for a rest. "But Nature saw them as nothing but a nuisance. They were killing the grass by walking on it and peeing everywhere. They ate anything that sprouted from the ground or bloomed on the bushes and would then shit it out all over Eden. Nature got pissed. She tried to wash them away with nasty storms and fry them with a piercing sun but those wily bastards kept figuring out ways to beat the system. When she figured out she couldn't kill them from the outside she found a way of using the Moon to instill sexual urges inside them. Pretty soon they were fickin all over the place, making babies and then the babies grew up and they all started screwing and fighting. The human body can only stand so much sexual tension, something that God had never calculated, and after a few years it just gives up and dies."

"Are you making this up?"

"God created Heaven and Hell as a temporary warehouse for all of the casualties until he could figure out a way to get his message to the people. If he was able to send someone with his sensibilities and knowledge to the Earth to spread the word, then all the crazy sex and killing would stop and he could figure out a way to repatriate the dead back into the fish tank."

"Wait, why didn't he just make Nature stop trying to eliminate his creation?"

The Sultan didn't like being interrupted. He wasn't good at keeping one line of thought going through his head and hated having to veer off course for fear of never finding his way back. "Creating shit is not like typing into a computer. You can't create something and then hit backspace a couple of times and take it all back! God wasn't into home repair. He didn't have a manual. He created something cool on his weekend and what happened next was out of his control."

"Are you saying he doesn't decide who lives or dies? He doesn't make it rain for forty days and forty nights?

"Are you paying any attention? All he wanted was some sea monkeys to use as a distraction during the down moments, you know, while he was writing his novel. The next thing he knew he had a hutch full of baby- making bunnies instead. He had to stop writing and spend all of his time finding a place for everybody to go after they used up their bodies with all the warring and humping. He was pissed as heck at Mother Nature for balling up the works, but there was nothing he could do about it." He pulled another folding chair out of his breast pocket and offered me a seat. "Now Hell was another mistake. He wanted a place for serial humpers and people with the desire to kill to go and be relatively safe and warm until he could fix the whole mess on Earth. He told his favorite angel to oversee the process and Satan kinda freaked out. At first he was doing pretty well, and then he took up smoking."

"This is sooo fucked up!" I plopped down into the folding chair. Thank goodness it was the type with a padded seat.

"Tell me about it!" Babe lifted his hat and wiped the sweat on his brow with his forearm. "When God found out about the smoking he got angry with Satan and took his cigs away. The Devil went into serious withdrawal and started making things hard on everyone in Hell. Trust me, it wasn't a nice place to be. I mean, he went from 2 packs a day to NOTHING. It wasn't pretty."

I was starting to think that Babe was making this story up as he went. "Who told you this?"

"That doesn't matter does it? The important thing is that you know how this mess got started, so you can go back to the living and spread the word."

"Who the FUCK told you this?" I was feeling angry. I didn't stop to consider that I hadn't been angry for quite some time....Maybe never. How could I? I was angry.

Babe Ruth's eyes got big. He trembled a little. The greatest baseball player of all time was afraid. Here he was, in the woods with the embodiment of evil only a few meager feet away and he was suddenly afraid for the first time. He was afraid of me.

"Who told you this bullshit?" My eyes flashed like the steel of a polished dagger. "Spit it out, FATBOY!"

His head lowered. The brim of his hat blocked my view of his eyes. His chin quivered as he answered, softly. "Red."

"Red Skelton, you stupid son of a bitch! Babe Ruth, you stupid son of a bitch! Which one of you son of a bitches is stupider?"

I didn't even notice that Babe had raised his hand in response to my question.

Chapter Sixty

2006-12-15T09:52:00.000-06:00

"First off.."Babe Ruth says to me."Let me be the first one to wish you a happy birthday."

I cocked my head. I tried to put the date into my head, but it wouldn't come.

"It's September the 2nd Marty, your birthday. If you could have anything you wanted in the world on this day, what would it be?" The Babe puffed out his chest as if to say he was ready to grant me my fondest wish, like a genie from a bottle.

"Geez, I don't know Mr. Ruth, I don't really want much right now. I'm still a little shaken by what just happened."

The Babe seemed a little upset by my remarks.

"An autograph?" I said sheepishly.

Babe Ruth laughed.

"A better container for the Devil?"

He looked down his nose at me and shook his head. "How about a ride to Louisville and a fish sandwich?" He produced a coupon from "Moby Dick's" fast food restuarant and handed it to me with pride. "Don't go in unless the "Now Frying" sign is lit. You don't want to eat there when the fish is cold."

"I'm more of a chicken man." I said under my breath.

"Heard about the chicken thing, thought maybe a change of pace might be in order for you son."

"I dunno" I kicked the moss around a nearby tree. "I really don't care much for fish."

"They have fried okra as a side...you can't beat that, nobody has that....okra...mutherficka!"

It was a little surprising to hear the Babe using gangsta speak. I began to contemplate how many times I'd been surprised in the last few days, or weeks, or however long it has been. My 360 degree vision allowed me to keep contact with the Sultan of Swat and still watch "The Box".

"Really, Marty, you have to start thinking about what changes you need to make in your life, and believe me, you're going to have to make changes." Babe pulled his cigar from the corner of his mouth and stared at the damp chewed end. He tried to flick off the ash but he ended up knocking the fire out of it. The ember flashed red and yellow as it bounced off of his pant leg and then died in the cold wet floor of the forest. "Do you know how hard it is to get a decent smoke here? Fick me." He pulled a lighter, emblazoned with a nascar logo and a picture of Dale Earnhardt, from his pants pocket and flamed the stogie back up. "Jesus! The Devil wouldn't even be in that fickin box if we could get brand name smokes here. This is worse than Europe!"

"Speaking of that." I said with a smile. "Where am I?"

My light attitude didn't please the King of the Homers. "You're in the ficking woods..dumbass!"

"I know that sir,but..."

"Don't you see the significance of that? Do you get the metaphor? The symbolism? The whatever the fick?" He blew on the hot end of his cigar to make it burn. "You are IN THE WOODS."

My smile couldn't hide the giveaway expression that I had no clue what he was talking about.

"In the classic movie The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is living a shitty life, surrounded by dumbshits and assholes. One day a big motherfickin tornado sucks her ass to a wonderful place with streets of gold and wonderous sights and all she wants is to get back to Kansas. It's the basis for all Amercian Cinema. No matter what the story, the lead character wants "Something Else" and then after having their shit handed to them in a dozen different ways, they realize that what they truly want is what they've already had. Christ, you even had the Tornado."

"I'm not even sure of what I had. Is this a movie?"

"Did I say this was a movie? This is real life, this is real death, that is a real Devil in that box. Some day you may be sitting in a lounge chair, sipping a wine cooler, wishing you were back in the woods with Babe Ruth waiting for hell to break loose every five minutes."

"Are you saying that everybody wants what they once had?"

"No, I'm saying every cucksucking movie at the multiplex has the same formula. That's what I'm saying!" A confused look formed under the brim of his Yankee baseball cap. "Oh you thought I had a life lesson for you...sorry. I'm just saying movies suck. You know every movie they've made about me they've had some good natured fat-ass play me. William Bendix, John Goodman. How is that supposed to make me feel? Listen, when I was a little kid my parents put me in an orphangae and then never came to visit. After I got out of there and started hitting home runs and getting free beer and pussy do you think that I wanted to be back in that good ole bastard farm?...Fick no! Frankly, I don't even care that I ended up here in the woods."

"Yea, I was wondering, why are you here?"

"And you! Do you want to go back to being a dickless accountant driving a Honda Civic? Is that what you want for the rest of your life. Having women walk all over you and people treat you like you should kiss their asses all day long? Well do ya?" He pointed his stubby index finger hard into my chest.

I could see the box start to shake a little and I was wondering if the Babe was keeping an eye on things.

"I didn't think so. Sure I made plenty of mistakes, and I'm going to pay for them for a long time, unless sonething terrible happens to Barry Bonds soon. I'm going to be here, whacking the poop outta Satan's ass everytime he tries to escape the box, but I aint sorry see? God he don't like people fornicating outside of marriage and he sure has his way of lettin you know bout it. He's got no room in his heart for carousers and louts."

I was shocked. "Babe are you saying that you didn't get into Heaven? Are you saying you were refused because you had sex out of marriage?

"You ever read the Bible Marty? You can read can't you?"

"But everybody knows the Bible is only metaphors and scare tactics to keep people in line on Earth, God forgives all sins!"

"You any good at baseball son?"

A note to my friends

2006-10-31T10:59:00.000-06:00

Listen! I've been really busy with trying to figure out my life and having a herniated disk in my neck and a rotator cuff that needs an operation and a problem with my wrist, which is not carpal tunnel, that nobody can figure out.
On top of that I came to a realization. This novel has been writing itself. Every word. As I progressed I would come up with great ideas while I wasn't typing and those were the periods when I wouldn't write a word. As a matter of fact I have the rest of the novel all planned out, including the ending, inside my head. This is not good. The novel doesn't like me adding my own ideas. The novel enjoys writing itself and absolutely hates my ideas. Now that I have come to this conclusion I will begin letting the story unfold to me, just as it unfolds to you. I will do this between surgeries and personal unpheaval. I appreciate you looking in on me from time to time. Love, Joe

The Box

2006-08-29T17:08:00.000-05:00

Chapter Fifty Nine

2006-08-29T15:26:00.000-05:00

A little walk in the woods... a shortcut. It was ok for me to take the path off the road into the dark forest. I was not afraid and besides that I could see everything in front and behind me.

The back of my head had an itch. When I reached around to scratch it I could see the palm of my hand. Pretty neat, eh?

When I ran into Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player of all time, I was very excited. He was dressed in his Yankee uniform, his pantlegs knee high and tucked into his stockings. In one hand he held a giant, smoking cigar that smelled like a burning cat. He was using his free hand to balance his weight on a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. He looked like he was posing for the cover of Life magazine.

"Marty! How nice of you to drop by!" He took a step towards me with those tiny feet making short strides. The cigar flew into his mouth as he shook my hand so hard the skin on his face fluttered. "I've been really looking forward to meeting you!"

"Are you kidding me? I never thought I would ever shake the hand of the Bambino! Not even in heaven!"

"There's a damn good chance you'd never shake it there Clark." He let out a belly laugh that shook us both. I laughed along with him, not really knowing which one of us was the least likely to reach the pearly gates. "Come over here a minute, I've got something to do."

I followed him to a clearing in the thick, dark, green woods. A streak of sunlight found the only gap in the trees and was shining down on a white box about the size of corporate trash dumpster. On the front of the box was the painting of a frown-faced clown with a daisy drooping from his ramshackle hat. The tragic comedians image was on top of a large red circle, outlined in white, another outline in green, and a black border. This combination seemed familiar to me but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

A horrible racket was coming from inside the box and it's lid jumped and banged like a large animal was inside trying to get out. The Babe stood with his legs parted like the Eiffel Tower, his bat lying on his shoulder.

"So what's in the box...Babe?" I asked playfully.

"It's the Devil." Babe spoke through his bouncing cigar.

"Ha! Do you mean Satan?"

"One and the same."

I was skeptical. "The Prince of Darkness is right there in a wooden box, here in this forest outside Louisville Kentucky?"

"Can you think of a better place for him?"

"What's keeping him in there?"

"A Yale padlock."

Sure enough, a Yale padlock was affixed in the loop of a flimsy metal hasp that had 6 screws fastened into the wooden lid and front. 3 on the splintering top and 3 on the cracking front.

"You know you can shoot a bullet into a Yale padlock and it won't open. I saw it on TV."

"Yea, that's a good lock alright!" The growling and spitting of the Devil was nauseating to me and getting louder by the moment. "I'm just a little concerned that the greatest source of evil on the world is trapped in that wooden box and the only thing between him and the rest of the world is that poorly made hasp there...Babe."

"I know, it seems a little flimsy doesn't it?" His eyes twitched nervously towards me and then back to the clown face.

"What's the Devil doing in the box to begin with?" The noise from inside got louder and the wood was starting to buckle.

"Do you know who Red Skelton is?" I nodded knowingly. "He tricked him in there. Made him think it was a giant case of cigarettes. The Devil's favorite brand. When he leaned in to grab a carton, Ole Red pushed him in and locked the lid. He called me to help him watch the thing and I've been here ever since."

"You're shitting me!" I would never had said "shitting" to Babe Ruth in my right mind. I recoiled a little from my own crudeness. Babe didn't flinch.

"It's true. Red was pretty disgusted with the guy and the way he ran things down in hell. He decided make the afterlife a better place."

"Red Skelton?"

"Look at the clown he painted on the front. That's him! He painted that there, just to stick it up Belezabub's heinie."

With a bang as loud as a shotgun firing, the screws flew out of the wood and the lid swung open wide. A large greenish creature with a mouth the size of a Yule log and teeth of a mountain lion poured from the opening. Growls and obscenities bubbled from his throat. His eyes shot flames onto his battered and bruised cheekbones. His arms stretched out wide as he spread his grimy fingers and wiggled his long, pointed, curled up fingernails. The horns on the top of his head wriggled like fishing worms and his tongue, long and forked, snapped like a bull whip.

The smell of death and sulfur filled the woods. My heart was pounding out of my chest in 3/4 time...Up tempo.

Just as Satan began to close his claws on the Babe's head, Ruth pulled the Louisville Slugger back behind his hat. In classic form, Babe Ruth hit a 500 foot homer over the center field bleachers in Wrigley, right into the Devil's jaw. His front left foot lifted, toe first, as he turned the bat into imperial ruler of hell.

The club, striking the face of evil, made the sound of a thousand railroad cars crashing into the audience at a Megadeath concert. Sparks like those from a welders torch spewed from his nose as he fell backwards, into the box. Little yellow birds circled his head.

Babe closed the lid and produced an old fashioned screw driver from his back pocket. It was 2 feet long and had a rotating screw machine in it's middle. He replaced the hasp and set the screws by pushing the device inwards towards the wood. Each screw took one quick motion. Six times he did this, and put the driver back in his pocket. Pulling the cigar from his mouth, he turned to me. "So, let's talk Marty."

Chapter Fifty Eight

2006-08-08T13:58:00.000-05:00

I watched the universe turn around me. The dew evaporated from every single blade of grass and I witnessed the transformation of the water into vapor and the vapor becoming part of the sky. The fiery hot sun made it's way directly overhead in what seemed like a minute. The world had changed around me and even though I was lying still in the field, I felt the changes inside.

When Popeye the Sailor would eat his spinach it would come out of the can in a blob and drop into his oval mouth. You could see the blob as it went down his pencil thin neck, stretch his chest, split at his crotch and fill his shoes. With the boom of a tympani, it would bounce back up to his stomach, chest, and then shoot down his forearms. With this instant infusion of green steroids he developed the strength of a thousand rogue elephants. He would have enough power to beat the ever living shit out of his enemies, in such a painful and cruel way that it was hard to believe that they could ever survive such a violent attack. They always did, somehow, though the pain should have been enough to leave them physically impaired for life or at the very least the beating should have remained in their memories long enough that they wouldn't fuck with Popeye ever again. One thing for sure, they were back in the next feature, tying an anchor around his neck and throwing him to the bottom of the sea so they could be free to date rape his girlfriend. Maybe the ferocity of the attacks erased all of their imprinted brain functions. Like walking into a tornado.

I didn't feel the physical strength of a Popeye/Spinach transformation, but emotionally I was filled up from my head to my shoes and I swear I heard the tympani sound as it came back through my heart and into my head. I had memories, I had attitudes, I had anger, I had desire, and I was waiting for my body to catch up. My jaw ached like I had just swallowed another person. It must be how a snake feels after lunch. My ribs didn't have the hard consistency of ribs, my chest felt more like the partially inflated tire in the trunk of Ted's Black Maria.

One other thing had changed. My sight was different. I now had tremendous peripheral vision. As a matter of fact, I could see behind me. I could see all the way around! It was very disturbing at first and while not exactly a "Super Power" for the moment it gave me the feeling of an empowered hero.

I used my new power to find the ringing cell phone that had been cast 40 feet behind me into the Kentucky scenery. It was saying "Ring, Ring!"in Cy's voice. He had a special ringtone made of his own voice.

Crawling to his phone I saw the sky and the ground and everything within a mile around me. The phone was speaking its Ring and flashing and buzzing like a carnival ride. It was a flip/style phone and needed to be opened to activate the communication process. Opening it was difficult because Serge's detatched right paw, still wrapped tightly about the device, was stiff and hardened in the same death grip he liked to keep on the little box when Cy allowed him to carry it about.

There was no other sign of the little monkey in the vicinity besides his little monkey hand on the phone. In my head I imagined him still alive, running to freedom in those woods I could see a half mile behind me. I snickered when I thought of him preparing to swing from tree to tree and discovering, all too late, that he was missing his right paw, plummeting, screaming that monkey scream, head first to the earth.

Having a monkey as a pet is like having a Gymnast as a girlfriend. The fascination only lasts until you realize that you don't have the energy to keep up. I was glad he was gone.

Serge's fingers made a crunchy sound as I pried them from the receiver. It's emotionally hard to break digits, even when they're dead. I put the hand in my right front pocket and it scratched my thigh a little as it went in. I didn't have the heart to throw it away. My mind raced with the ugly pictures of the possible types of bacteria that must live under a monkey's fingernails.

The caller ID display on the front of the phone read "Raymond." Why was he calling Cy? What would I say to him? Was it Raymond from the drug store? By the time I found the "talk" button the limited time I had to answer had expired and the call went to Cy's voice mail. After fumbling and typing on the buttons I managed to retrieve the terse message. "Yellow hammers!" said the voice, the word "Click!" and the call was over. There was no number to redial the caller, only the ID that said "Raymond."

I put the phone in my left pocket to keep in separate from the monkey hand and began to walk. I passed the accident site. The wrecked car was gone. Cy was gone.

All I had to remember what had happened was Cy's cell phone, Serge's right hand, and Ted Stockings inside my body. I was walking towards Louisville. I guess.

Chapter Fifty Seven

2006-06-09T14:00:00.000-05:00

I was unconscious for a couple of hours there in that field of beautiful bluegrass. During my blackout I went to a place unlike any I had ever visited. A place of such incredible mediocrity that I would've rather been sitting in the waiting room of a half blind dentist.

I was seated in a folding lawn chair, the aluminum, tubular kind, with worn, tattered green and white webbing. I was shirtless, wearing a pair of stained, white shorts and black cowboy boots with silver tips. A pink kiddy pool was only a couple of yards away, near the middle of a postage stamp yard that was surrounded by an 8 foot stockade fence. Every minute of the two hours elapsed while I sat. The only distraction came as a tabby cat wandered part way across the skimpy lawn and decided to lay down for a nap next to a dirty, striped, toy ball.

After about an hour and forty minutes a gleaming white baseball came over the top of the fence and landed not far from the pool. I stood up and grabbed the ball, tossed it back over the wall and clumsily drove my boots back to the chair. I noticed a bird had "shat" a small but fruitful white blob on the arm. Making no attempt to wipe the gift off, I sat back down and arranged my arm and elbow in such an uncomfortable way as to receive the benefits of sitting in the chair and yet live with the danger of possibly touching it.

Near the end of the dream I saw a pair of hands at the top of the fence near where I had thrown the baseball. The sounds of straining came from that direction giving the impression that someone was trying to lift themselves by their fingers to the summit of the stockade. The noise and the signs of blood being pushed around inside the digits lasted for several minutes, providing some much welcome suspense to my terribly boring plight. A head emerged and the young man threw his elbows over the top. He was a horrible looking human, smiling the smile of tremendous gratitude, giving me the indication that the ball had belonged to him and he wanted to show some appreciation for having it returned. His smile did not bring pleasure. The ugly young thing had too many teeth. I had the thought that he probably had twice as many teeth as a normal person would have.

A hammer with a yellow handle was laying at my feet. Impulsively, I picked it up by the colorful grip and threw it as hard as I could in the direction of this hideous creature. He continued his mutated smile as the tool flew end over end towards his head. I awoke with a start at the moment it would've hit him.

My body felt like every bone had splintered into a thousand pieces. My spine wasn't strong enough for me to sit up even though I tried and tried. I could see Cy lying next to the crumpled car. He was still alive and unconscious. I could tell because he was snoring with the volume of the engine that drives the octopus ride that would occupy the streets of Arfordsville, across from Raymond's drug store, during the tobacco-days festival held every summer about this time. This was the first time I had ever considered the possibility that a person might snore after having their brains knocked unconscious.

When I was young my father had told me that the way to tell the quality of a cigar was the by the length of the ash. The finer the cigar, the longer the ash would stay intact. Cy still had a long , Churchill, cigar between his front two teeth, and although it had burned for quite some time before it extinguished, it still looked like a complete but gray stogie. Only the best for Cy.

The sun was rising and the grass was wet with morning dew. My pants were feeling uncomfortable with the wetness. There was no sign of Ted or Serge the monkey. I sighed with the thought of his demise. "What am I gonna do now!" I lamented.

"Your going to do what your supposed to do Marty." I knew what Ted was going to say before he said it. His cowboy boots nudged me in my ribs. "Don't try to get up just yet."

"Thank God your alive." I shielded my eyes from the rising sun as I spoke. Ted snickered at my words. "You are alive aren't you?"

"I've been meaning to talk to you about that. I'm not exactly who you think I am Marty." There was a kindness to his voice.

"I knew it! You ARE the Devil, aren't you!"

"Would you stop with the Devil shit? For the last time, I'm not the fucking Devil....OK?"

"Then who are you Ted?" I was desperate and my words sounded more like crying.

"First of all, my name's not Ted Stockings. I made that up. That's a joke." I looked at him bewildered. What kind of joke is that?

"Ted Stockings is name of a kind of support hose. It's a T.E.D. Stocking. It's something that a patient with arterial problems or varicose veins or Gangrene would be prescribed to reduce the possibility of thrombosis or some such shit. It helps prevent blood collecting in one spot. It keeps things moving. I thought it was funny."

"Hilarious." I said sarcastically.

"Hey, go into a hospital sometime and ask for a Mr. Ted Stockings and just watch the nurses pee in their panties laughing."

"I'll do that."

"We gotta work on your sense of humor."

"So what do we call you now?"

"You don't call me anything my friend. You won't be talking to me anymore. It's time for you to get up and face the music by yourself. It's time for you to put yourself together."

"Hey! I was getting used to you leading me around by the nose. I was used to following."

"What do you mean getting used to it? You've been letting people lead you around and tell you what to do your entire, pathetic life. I was trying to show you what a Goddamn wimp you've been. I've been painting you a picture of a pitiful, piss-ant of man named Marty....Marty." Ted gave himself a quirky smile with his tirade.

He reached down and yanked off his boots and socks. I watched in horror as he removed his clothes until he was completely naked. "I don't know what's going to happen next, I can only speculate. I don't know anything about the future, I only know your past. I'm here to give you the shit line on what you've done. What you do next is anybody's guess. I do know that whatever you're going to do, you'll do it as a whole person. That I can Goddamn guarantee!"

Ted bent over and grabbed the upper part of my mouth with his left hand and the lower with his right. "In case you need it spelled out for you..." He opened my mouth so wide the bones in my jaw cracked. His right foot went over my tongue and into my throat. "My name is..." He shoved his other foot inside me like a man slipping into a sleeping bag. I could see his penis and balls coming toward my face as his hips squeezed through. Although this image would have normally horrified my homophobic side, I found his jewels somehow attractive. His chest passed down my gullet and he and I were face to face. Seconds later he would pass completely through into my body and fill me with his presence. My body would no longer feel broken. I soon would be able to hop to my feet and find my own way out of here.

While we were still face to face he told me who he really was. I expected "Beelzeabub or the Dark Prince." The truth was really no surprise.

"My name is Marty." Ted said calmly. "Live with it asshole."

Chapter Fifty Six

2006-05-28T22:40:00.000-05:00

My brain was feasting on the facts and figures that Cy was regurgitating through the night. I hadn't realized that my blockage of numbers had broken free . It felt really good to remember and to not have the numeric figures jump up on the page and then scamper off like ants. We had gone from discussing how much money I'd managed to sock away before my accident with the chicken, which by the way was nothing to sneeze at, to the large purchases made on the promises and down-payments of my investors. Cy had layed out a litany of product endorsements for me to approve or dismiss. I was having real "Marty" fun!

Cy opened up a portfolio of movie scripts that he had received from potential clients that he wanted me to look over. He was interested in becoming a producer of a major motion picture. There was the "Swoosh" sound of pages turning as he leafed through the manuscripts. The noise came from Cy's mouth, not the paper.

"Here's one about a man that builds an automobile engine that runs entirely on pee." He could hardly contain his excitement. "The big oil companies try to kill him, and the carmakers try to get the license to the design so they can bury it." He took the cigar from his teeth and stared at me intently. "It's called Urine Trouble."

There was a lengthy pause as we gazed at one another. I could not muster a reaction. He tossed the script to the floorboard. "Plop!" he said.

"Here is one about a professional baseball pitcher that gets abducted by aliens. During the course of his kidnapping they reverse a couple of bones in his forearm and he develops the nastiest pitch ever seen. If you can make contact with the ball, it bounces right off the bat and into your forehead." I studied Cy's forehead just to make sure it wasn't based on a true story. "This one is called Screwball."

Pause. "Plop!"

"Ok, this one is a little more cerebral. There is this mean guy that commits a murder and gets away with it. He gets sick and the Doctors discover he has a brain tumor. After they remove it he becomes a really nice fellow, but he is haunted with the knowledge that he killed his wife. A year later he falls in love with the policewoman doing follow up on the crime he's responsible for. She gets all caught up in a moral dilemma when he finally confesses his deed."

"Wow, that sounds pretty good! How does it end?"

"That's something the author needs to work on. Not all movie scripts end up going to the screen with the same endings. I'm not at all happy with the payoff here."

"Let me guess. I would say that since she's a good cop, she talks him into turning himself in and they give him a break because of the medical circumstances." I held my hands up in a "Voila" styled wave.

"Not exactly. She bends the facts to implicate a guilty murderer who had escaped conviction from an earlier crime in which she had botched the investigation and he got off on a technicality. She and the real killer start a wonderful life together."

"That sounds a little immoral, but still compelling."

"Plop!" He threw the script to the floor in anticipation." Then the guy grows a new brain tumor and kills her."

I scratched the scar on my head.

"Anybody need a Starbucks?" Ted called from the front seat. Serge was behaving himself, with his arms around Ted's waist and staring up at him with affection.

"I could use a break. How long until we get to Louisville?" I asked.

"Almost there, but we have a lot of things to get done as soon as we arrive. We better stop now and get everything adjusted." Serge reached up and slipped Ted's hat off of his head and placed it on his own.

Ted looked different without his hat. This is the first time I'd seen him without it on. I studied his reflection in the rear view mirror with new interest. He had short, wavy brown hair that was matted down on his skull. I had just assumed all along that he must be bald, this revelation came as quite a surprise to me. His eyes met mine in the mirror and they shifted left to right in a nervous reaction. I got the feeling that he didn't want me to see him without his hat. He tried to wrench it off of Serge's head but the monkey had decided not to give it back.

"Let go you little bastard." I was concerned about Ted's sudden disdain for Serge's antics. The wrestling became more pronounced and Serge squawked with displeasure. "Let go you dirty little motherfucker!" The car swerved dangerously. Ted's eyes kept shifting from the monkey, to the road, and back to me. "Give it back!"

Right before the car hit the tree and I was thrown 200 yards from the wreckage, a streetlight illuminated Ted's entire face. The hat had been hiding an unusual scar just below his hairline. It looked very familiar to me.

It was my scar.