The Abysmal Adventures of Porno Rabbit and Cracky the Corpse - Lesson Eight

Cracky had spent a good portion of his life, and all of his death, in Butte but he still had a hard time getting around sometimes.  Tonight after everybody had taken off and left him by the college, and then the sun had gone down, he was seriously disoriented.   From the Montana Tech campus he got his directions all mixed up and went south until he saw a familiar sight – in this case, it was the Mt. Moriah Cemetery.   He knew a couple of grave occupants there who were willing to be patient enough with him that they had helped him in the past, so he sought one of them out and laid down on top of the burial mound.  Eventually he found out what route to take to get to the Berkeley Pit from there.  He set out due north/northeast, found Shields Avenue, and in due time managed to arrive at the Pit.  His goal was to find Mystery Dog.

Once Cracky got to the Pit, Mystery Dog found him.   The horrendous looking canine came running up to Cracky with great excitement.  So covered in poisonous and toxic material that he put off a dim glow on a mostly moonless night, the wretched dog picked up one of Cracky’s leg bones that had just fallen off, and carried it for him as they went back to where the good-hearted corpse had set up the third and last doghouse for M.D.  If anyone had seen them, they would have had to concede that it was a rather touching scene, the glowing radioactive mutt and the gimpy corpse, trundling along together in an obvious spirit of true and simple friendship.

As they walked, Cracky was explaining to Mystery Dog what had happened, or at least giving him the version of it that Cracky’s fragmented brain had registered.  The dog appeared to be listening intently as Cracky described his problems with his misplaced eyeballs, the huge angel crashing on the roof of the Volare’, the angry dwarf man in the plaid skirt who had yelled at him and then barked orders to the big angel lady, and how then they all disappeared and left Cracky lying on the ground with his foot bone lodged in a hole.  The retelling was distressful for Cracky and, it appeared, for Mystery Dog as well.

After hearing his friends disjointed and perplexing tale, the dog made to leave and head in a westerly direction.  Cracky got the idea and followed along.  Mystery Dog apparently had some idea where the druid and the angel had taken Cracky’s pal, and the dog had every intention of going over there and sorting things out.  Cracky was  delighted by this.  He wanted his friend back and he wanted to maybe see Mystery Dog bite that ill-tempered, square-headed little man on the leg.

The Abysmal Adventures of Porno Rabbit & Cracky the Corpse, Lesson Seven

Back in the makeshift “catacombs” at 1308 North Main, Ayzook was trying to figure out what to do next. He and Ralphie had brought that bizarre rabbit creature back here to interrogate him about the missing money. But so far things were not going as planned.




Ralph had flown back with the rabbit under his wing, and the trip had been a bit rocky; the rabbit had not fared too well. The angel had dropped him once and had to swoop down and catch him. He had then pissed himself, for one thing, and Ayzook wasn’t even sure how a rabbit could do this. He was figuring since this was not an ordinary rabbit maybe he should not expect him to follow the general guidelines of rabbit behavior or even physiology. But it was unnerving; this whole experience seemed to be unhinging the mind of the filthy little pornography peddling furball. And Ayzook needed some information – if the rabbit went belly-up then Ayzook would not be far behind. He knew the Druid Council would be on him any day; it could be sooner than he expected even. He had to get the rest of that money – he needed the entire fifteen grand. He felt like time was running out on him and he was not in control of the situation.



When Ayzook had arrived at the smashed Plymouth parked by the college, he had basically found one hell of a mess. On the car’s roof stood Ralphie – he had smoked so much ganja that he could barely speak and it was difficult for Ayzook to even find out who was who. Ralph had not bothered to drag the rabbit out of the wreckage; the bunny was still pinned inside and was hollering about the mayor and gopher holes and pounding his foot incessantly against the dashboard. Meanwhile a few feet away the stupid corpse who was his companion had somehow twisted off one of his feet – he was lying on the ground flopping around while apparently gouging out his eyeballs with his own fingers. Ayzook did not know if this was an accident or part of some kind of undead ritual. He tried to talk to the corpse but it was useless. Ayzook concluded in a very short period of time that this dead thing was beyond communicating – he knew nothing, he had no idea of past or present behavior by himself or anybody else. When Ayzook had Ralph carry the rabbit back to the church, he had just left the babbling, floundering corpse on the ground by the car. His last words to the thing were, “You go to Hell.” The zombie had replied with something about doghouses and Jughead bringing Betty Cooper around to fix up the Volare’ so they could drive it back to Riverdale.




Now in the catacombs Ayzook stood by the tiny crypt in the wall where his old pal Dobie the turtle was interred. He was thinking that maybe the last time anything around him had truly made him happy was back in the 1970s when he had his beloved pet at his side. He didn’t even want to think about the cruelty of Madame Fate and the sad demise of his hard-shelled friend.




In the next room the rabbit was babbling away. Ralphie was sitting on the floor next to Porno and she was eating a taco and washing it down with bourbon. Her wings smelled of bunny piss. She really wasn’t even paying any attention to the rabbit anymore. There didn’t seem to be a point. Porno was talking about movie producers and film printing and distribution rights and biker gangs and who knew what else. The druid had found Porno’s “business records” in the glovebox with the remaining money but there were no actual names for anybody, nothing he could use to figure out where the other four grand had gone. It was just some ridiculous code and so far the rabbit had not provided the information to decipher it.




At first Ayzook thought the bunny was putting on an act to stall or try and throw his captors off course – but by now Ayzook was pretty sure the rabbit had more or less lost his marbles, and couldn’t tell them anything useful even if he wanted to. All Ralph was doing was baby-sitting this gibbering idiot, and Ayzook knew that pretty soon she would just decide to take the rest of the ass-kicker pot and go smoke it on the roof of the courthouse or down by the train depot, leaving him alone with this babbling fool.




“Here’s how it started. Whiskey Moe lost the bet to me over the fighting dogs, okay?” Porno was saying. “You should ask him about the way things work on the street corners downtown. He knows more about nothing than any other totally ignorant dumb person you might ever accidentally find,” he said. Ayzook had the idea at this point that the rabbit was genuinely trying to be helpful, out of fear if nothing else.




Ralph the Angel took another snort out of his bottle and looked over at the rabbit. “Dude, what’s with the foot? Why all the kicking and shit?” Porno was hammering away on the floor with his big flat foot; it was echoing through the underground rooms and Ayzook was getting a migraine.




“Walt Disney fucked me over big time!” Porno said. “I tried to make a deal with him and the Trix Rabbit but it all backfired and suddenly that Disney rabbit from the Bambi movie was all up in my grill and next thing you know I can’t eat no colorful breakfast cereal no more and my foot is stomping like a Chuck Berry song was ripping through my ears! It was the classic double cross if you want to know the truth.” This actually made more sense than anything else Porno had said in the past fifteen minutes.




Porno turned to Ralph with a desperate look in his eye. “Cracky!” he said. “What did you guys do with Cracky?”




“The corpse? We left him in the dirt by the car. He was totally out of it, man.”




“Gol’ darn it! That dad-blamed zombie can’t be trusted to take care of hisself!”




Ralph had a very amused and puzzled look on her face. “Why are you talking like that all of a sudden? Are you channelling Snuffy Smith now or something?”




Just then there was a strange whooshing sound from up above. Both Ayzook and Ralph heard it. Before they could even react, they both sensed that there was another presence in the underground cavern. A mystical one, and a powerful one.




Ayzook turned and took two steps out into the entryway where the door from up above opened onto the chamber. What he saw did not make him very happy.




By the doorway stood a very unusual being – dressed as a nun but obviously an undead being, with blackened skin and long white dreadlocks of all things. This large creature exuded a sense of power. Ayzook looked again and then he saw the eyes, glowing through the darkness. And the fangs. Dripping fangs.




“Oh, shit!” he exclaimed. “Ralphie! Get out here! Quick – need backup! Ralphie?”




“Boots,” said Sister K.T. as she examined Ayzook. And she smiled. This was the thing that she had sensed on the miserable corpse of that former loser boyfriend that she had encountered by the theater. This was the blood she had smelled on him. Mystical blood. Druid blood. And there was nothing rarer, or more forbidden . . . or sweeter.




Ayzook was trying to back away. He was thinking about all those glyphs he didn’t remember and how useful it would be if he knew any of them about now. “Ralph,” he said. “This is serious.” He still did not hear his friend coming to his assistance.




“Sugartown,” said the Unblessed Vampire Sister of the Jamaican Catholic Apocalypse. She tilted her head to one side and her dreads flipped about behind her habit. Ayzook was watching her but then suddenly she just wasn’t there. He didn’t have time to even assess this perception however; she was just as suddenly at his side and had him by the head. Sister K.T. twisted the druid’s head impossibly to the side and exposed his throat.




And then she sunk her glorious fangs deep into his mystical flesh. He was gurgling something about “berserkers” but the tearing of his esophagus brought that to a quick halt. There was a sickly ripping sound and his throat was torn wide open. Blood flew through the air and splashed everywhere, on the floor, on the ceiling, along the walls – and all over the doorway to the little crypt of Dobie the Most Unfortunate Druid’s Friend and Pet Turtle of Butte of Montana.

The Abysmal Adventures of Porno Rabbit and Cracky the Corpse - Lesson Six

Porno Rabbit was having a good day.  He was nothing if not organized.  Generally he kept meticulous records of his business dealings (otherwise he feared somebody he was associated with would use some information related to their “mutual business practices” against him somehow), including who he paid off to do what, how much, what sort of personal info he might have regarding that person in case they tried to come back on him and bite him in his bunny ass – that sort of thing.  Of course now that he was living in a car with a corpse, his filing system amounted to whatever paper he could get crammed in the glove box.  Not much space for a filing cabinet in the Volare’.

So he was poring over his records.  Cracky hadn’t been around for hours so he had taken advantage of the chance to air out the Volare’ and get rid of the stench of decay and death that always pervaded the vehicle – well, he couldn’t entirely get rid of it, but he cleared it out enough that he could stand to sit in the car for prolonged periods of time (with the help of about fifteen dimestore air fresheners of course).  Everybody in the loop had been paid; the wheels had all been greased and within a day or two he should have in hand a couple dozen prints of his new film, “Ladies and Gents, Jizz on Her -- The Mayor!” – in full color, with sound (mostly overdubbed but some of it actual grunts, snorts and filthy talk coming from his new star, the soon-to-be bad boy of City Hall).  Things were set up for “distribution” with the bikers, other porno dealers (both local and around the state) and a few select other sources.  It was kind of tricky to get it spread around strategically before confronting the mayor with the quote-unquote, Original Print.  But Porno had been down this road before and he was confident he had things under control.  And his costs so far were just a little over $4100, so he still had most of his “nest egg” stashed away.  Maybe he should even consider opening a bank account.  Naah . . . no need for such complications; no need at all.

A shift in the wind brought the stench of rotting flesh to his sensitive bunny nostrils – telling Porno that Cracky was back from wherever he had been all day.  He was in such a good mood he wasn’t even going to let Cracky’s stinky corpse and the accompanying gibberish get him down.  Not today.  This was a good day.

Cracky looked either alarmed or confused as he approached the car.  Porno knew the dead-as-a-doornail dimwit had only a few different emotions that he could dip into, and there was some overlap on the expressions that he wore with each.  That was good ol’ Cracky – a semiconscious stiff in search of a slab, a mixed-up dead body with, literally, a pea sized brain.

“Porno!” he said as he ambled towards the car.  “Porno!  Guess what?”

Porno didn’t look up from his figures and calculations.  “No idea,” he said.

“I spent the money you gave me! All of it I think, except for what I accidentally dropped down the toilet at the library.”

“Mmmm-hmmm.  Were you checking out some books, some research materials perhaps?”

“No, no, Porno.  That’s silly; I was there to check and see if any of them people who are always sitting around motionless at tables were dead yet.  It seemed like there had to be some, but I didn’t find – Oh, but wait!  Guess what, like I said!”

Porno put the stack of papers down on the seat next to him.  “Oh, for Christ’s – Cracky, I give up, okay?  Tell me what you are talking about, or whatever . . . .”  He waited for this to soak into Cracky’s ruptured noggin.

“I spent that money on Mystery Dog!” he said, very pleased with himself.  “I could have bought some food for me but I hit the dumpsters instead.  And I used that cash to buy Mystery Dog some houses.”

“That’s nice, Cracky.  Wait a minute – houses?  You bought more than one dog house for that smelly old moldy carpet bag of a dog?”

Cracky nodded his head with great enthusiasm; so much so that his lower jaw fell off.  It bounced across the pavement and he had to chase it for several feet before he caught up to it, and then proceeded to reattach it so he could continue to talk.  This was far from the first time this sort of thing had occurred and the joints were pretty loose.

“Three of ‘em, actually,” he said thoughtfully.  “I got him three houses before one would take.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Take’ I mean,” Porno said with kind of a morbid interest now growing in his rabbit skull – the novelty of a conversation with this gibbering idiot of an animated corpse could be worthwhile, if one was in a good enough mood to endure it.

“Well,” Cracky began, “that first one I put right next to the slough in the bottom of the pit, and it kind of sunk into the mud and was gone, real quick like.  I bought another one and put it in the same place, and, you know?  It sunk in again!  I thought it would just sit up on top of the first one.”

“Great, Cracky, great.”

“But then the third one I put up the bank a ways and it works good!  Kind of slanted though, but I put the side with the hole facing sideways and not up or down, so Mystery Dog can spend time in his house and rest up without falling out.”

“Yes, yes, of course.  Rest up from his long day of hard work being a stinking, filthy, wretched, mangy, rotten, cemetery-haunting boil on the ass of local humanity,” said Porno.

Cracky frowned.  “Do you really think he has been boiled?  Anyway but listen - I don’t think he went in the house, though, not while I was there.  In fact – wait a minute - - -"

Cracky looked more than perplexed, then his peeling, melting excuse for a face changed again, to reflect some other enigmatic revelation.

“He didn’t go in because I ain’t seen Mystery Dog all day,” Cracky observed.  “No wonder he wouldn’t help me pick out the color scheme for his houses.”

Porno was trying too hard to make this conversation make sense, and he knew it.  “Okay, then.  You bought him three houses, and he likes them, but he hasn’t seen any of them and he doesn’t know that you bought them for him, and two of them are buried in the mud.  Is that about right?”

“Hmmmm . . ."  Cracky rubbed his jaw thoughtfully with his hand but one side of it fell loose again so he had to stop messing with it completely.  “Yeah . . . . yeah.  That seems – hey, wait, did I tell you about the church lady with the rotten teeth and the red eyeballs?”  He was excited again.  The ever-changing, ever-rotting brain provided almost endless opportunities for new or newly-remembered experiences.  Sometimes Porno kind of envied him that.

“Church lady, eh?”  Porno thought he might want to pay attention to this.  “No, you didn’t.  Tell me about the church lady and the eyeballs.”  He settled back into the driver’s seat, prepared to wait this out while Cracky tried to give him this information.

“Red eyes!  Glowing red eyes!  And she flew; she flew down from the sky all dressed up like that statue thing up on the mountainside over town!  Only I don’t think the statue has fangs,” Cracky reported.

“Fangs?”

“Yeah like in the movies, or that one biker who was drinking everybody’s blood around here last year, remember that?  I wonder what ever happened to him . . . ?” Cracky was drifting away again.

“Cracky . . . .”

“I like motor bikes,” Cracky said.  “And Jughead.  I like Jughead comics. I asked the vampire church lady if she had any but she just used her mind to bore more holes into my skull.  She never did answer my question – or actually say anything, for that matter.”

Porno’s eyes were now open wide.  Cracky had just dropped the “V” word.  “Are you saying she was a vampire?” he cautiously asked his friend.  He had figured the fang remark was just a fluke, up until now.

“A vampire?  What’s that?  Do you mean like an umpire?  Or a van tire?  Do you like Reba McIntyre?  How about Dick van Dyke?”  Cracky was decomposing pretty fast now.

“The church lady,” Porno said.  He knew he was about to lose Cracky’s attention and he had better work fast if he was going to get anything useful.  “Flying with the red eyes and vampire teeth and she bored holes in your mind.  What else do you remember?  Think, Cracky!  Was she trying to find something in your so-called brain?”

Cracky rolled his eyes.  One disappeared completely into the cavern of his ruptured skull.  “I think she was looking for magic and then she saw the money,” he said.  “I don’t know what that means or why I just said it.  That’s what I remember her leaking into my head though.”  He now had his index finger buried up to the knuckle in his eye socket, fishing for the missing eyeball.

“Oh, Holy Shit!” Porno exclaimed.  This was trouble. This was real trouble.  Maybe he should have done a little more research to try and track the source of this money, before he started spreading it around.  But it was so easy to just not look the gift corpse in the mouth, to just go with it.  Right before Cracky had shown up, Porno had even been thinking now was probably a good time to see if they could get a room at the War Bonnet Hotel, to move up in the world a little bit, to start living the high life (for hygienic reasons Cracky would have had to stay in the Volare’ down in the parking lot, naturally).  But if there was a crazy vampire who had some interest or some connection to this money, he was now thinking about going with a much lower profile – and maybe even getting the hell out of Butte for a little while.

Just as Porno mulled over this information, trying to plan his next move, there was the sound of a tremendous crash and breaking glass – all Hell was busting loose and it seemed to be happening right on the roof of the Volare’!  The sedan’s top crumpled down far enough to be touching the tips of Porno’s ears.  Something – something HUGE – had just landed on top of the car.  This frightened Porno into total distraction.  His foot was thumping the floorboards like crazy.  Cracky hadn’t noticed and was now trying to fit two fingers into the same eye socket.

You would have had to be a supernatural being of some sort to even see it – but if you were, and you were in the area, you would have witnessed quite a display, here in the parking lot across the street from the Montana Tech Administrative Hall.  You would have seen a dilapidated and now crumpled Plymouth Volare’ four door sedan (two tone paint), with the roof crushed partway in and one of the side windows popped out by the pressure.  On the roof of the car, doing the crushing, you would have seen a seven foot tall broad-shouldered female figure, complete with flowing blonde hair and a pair of somewhat disheveled wings.  Ralphie looked unsteady, like she was a bit staggered by the impact of her landing, but she had managed to keep her balance as well as keeping ahold of the fifth of Old Grand Dad that she was gripping with her left hand.  In her mouth was a joint.  A big, fat joint.

“Whoa Nellie!  YEEE-HAH!!” she exclaimed, and then burped.  “Zooka-rooba, where the hell are ya?  I think I found your pigeon for you!  Or rabbit, rather,” she added as something of an afterthought.  She pulled on the joint and the ember on the end of it glowed.  She held her breath and then exhaled loudly.  “And Jeeee-sus, good buddy!,” she said.  “This is some righteous reefer!  I barely landed without killing somebody!  Where did you score this stuff?”

Inside the car Porno was trying to get his leg to behave, and his ears were tangled up in the tattered headlining.  He heard Ralphie’s exclamations but didn’t entirely understand them.  He knew one thing though:  that somebody, the rabbit was thinking, the one who was nearly killed – that would be yours truly.

It sure as hell wasn’t Cracky.  He was already dead, for one thing.  And besides that, he had staggered around with his finger in his eye until his bony foot became jammed in a gopher hole.  Now he was twisting in circles with one hand stuck in his eye socket and the other one flailing about for balance like some kind of unskilled tightrope walker.  He was going round and round but his foot was stuck and his ankle was twisting impossibly, like somebody winding the rubber band on a balsa wood airplane.

God damn, Porno thought as he watched this.  I wish his foot would just hurry up and twist the hell off so he could fall in a heap in the dirt and be done with it.  This is just too painful to watch.

Porno thought just for a second about the gopher hole.  But it looked too small, too tight.  He would never be able to scamper down it, even if Cracky’s foot wasn’t blocking his path.  He wished he could take a hit off the big galoot’s reefer.

There was no way this was going to go back to being a good day for the enterprising rabbit pornographer.  No way at all.

The Formation of RUMINATA, A Blog I Am Creating in Celebration of My Ignorance

Where Would The World Be Without "i.e."?




Following the lead of my friend Roberta, I am branching off with another blog that is directed more towards personal observation (i.e., stupid ideas about things) rather than creative writing (i.e., made up stupid ideas about things).  As soon as I figure out how to do it (i.e., as soon as Stacey does it for me), I will add this blog to my list of linked blogs on this page.  Thanks in advance to anyone who has so much time to waste that they would deign to check this out.

The Abysmal Adventures of Porno Rabbit and Cracky the Corpse - Lesson Five

From her vantage point atop the Mother Lode Theater on West Park, Sister Kilia “Toots Roll” Tosh could clearly see the dumpsters in the alley across the way, behind the Mongolian grill – which had of course been closed for hours.  It was almost four in the morning, and just about everything had been closed for hours.  But this was the time when Sister Kilia Toots liked to prowl.  It was a time when regular folks were less likely to be out and about; less likely to witness a dark-skinned nun dressed in full habit and with long white dreadlocks slithering down her back – less likely to see her scaling the sheer walls of old brick buildings and bounding fifteen or twenty feet into the air with a single leap.

This was the time for the Unblessed Vampire Sister of the Jamaican Catholic Apocalypse to do her hunting.

Sister K.T.’s eyesight in the dark was impeccable.  So was her hearing, even though she was wearing an ear bud that was playing an endless loop of her favorite singer – Nancy Sinatra.  Few people knew that Ms. Sinatra was also a vampire, and Sister K.T. really related to her message.  She obviously had the upper hand on every other creature that she encountered, particularly the males of the species – the blood sucking was only vaguely hinted at in a few of the numbers but to Kilia it was clear as night.  She figured the dusky-voiced starlet was probably feeding on her musical partner Lee Hazlewood throughout the 1960s. 

Sister Kilia Toots tuned into some rustling noises in the area of the dumpsters.  Someone or something was scrounging around down there – and whatever it was that was hunting for decaying food in the garbage bins, was about to be transformed from the hunter to the hunted.  The Sister smiled and her fangs dripped bloody saliva onto the front of her scapular.  She was more or less under a self-imposed vow of silence and tried to rarely let out so much as a peep.  But when she noticed the slobber stains on her tunic she uttered a single word in response:

“Shit.”

Being one of the Unholy Undead, it wasn’t really practical for Sister K.T. to wear a crucifix or a rosary, such as most living nuns would have chosen to adorn themselves with.  The smell of her own seared and burning flesh would have been a distraction to say the least.  Instead Kilia Toots had a Volkswagen hood ornament around her neck on a chain that was rather too thick and clumsy, but necessary to hold the cumbersome emblem.  She had removed it from the fresh corpse of some hip-hop or gangsta rap poser after she was finished draining him of both his blood and his bad musical taste.  Adding the essence of the beat of his heart and his music to her already uneasy mix of Bob Marley and Nancy Sinatra was yet another distraction, but so be it.  This was but one of the adjustments she was forced to make to remain a Bride of Jesus in spite of the fact that she was a full-fanged blood sucking hellspawn most of the time.

Her existence these days was a conflicted one, but the Sister endeavored to persevere.

As she gazed closer across the alley, her shoulders slumped a bit.  Her unnatural vision penetrated the darkness and enabled her to get a clear view of the being invading the dumpster.  She was disappointed.  This was not a creature that possessed either life, or blood, or even much of a brain.  She knew this thing.  However, there was something else at play here.  She could feel some other mystical element attached to the aura of this dim-witted undead stooge that was busily decaying in the alley across the way.  She was going to have to get a closer look to get spiritual clarification.

With a disgusted grunt she leapt from the top of the theater.  Her VW bling flipped up and hit her in the eye as she eerily descended to the alley just behind the dumpster, which was being loudly invaded by none other than Cracky, that stupid zombie creature that was always staggering through the streets like an inebriated copper miner after a St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Cracky sensed her presence.  He pulled most of his left arm out of the dumpster (the hand had come loose and was still in the garbage container clutched around a half-eaten noodle bowl), and turned to see Sister Toots.  He didn’t currently have any of the pieces of gray matter necessary to actually recognize her, though they did in fact know each other and had even dated once or twice many years ago, before either had attained their current state of evil piety and/or Undeadness.  But this was another story, and as noted, one which the clumsy corpse was not currently privy to and which the vampire nun would have given almost anything to forget.  So Cracky just stood there staring, and as he started to lose his balance his knees began to noisily knock together.

Sister Kilia Toots stood and stared back at the rickety dead thing for a long moment.  She was reading the aura which surrounded him, and there was definitely some other mystical element which he had recently been in contact with – and not something that was commonly encountered on the streets of Butte.  It was not currently present, but Kilia could sense that it was still somehow connected to this idiot.  Her glowing red eyes smoldered menacingly in her skull.  Moonlight danced off the wet fangs that protruded over her bottom lip.  There was no sound.

Cracky finally found his voice.  “Do you have any Jughead comic books to sell or trade?” he asked rather timidly.

Sister K.T. slowly closed her thin white lids over the glowing red orbs.  Her body language mimicked a deep sigh, even though she did not breathe.

“Balls,” she said, and with a nearly silent swoosh she lifted off the ground and was gone.  Cracky’s knees gave a final hard knock and some bone chips clattered onto the pavement.

By this time Sister Kilia Toots was already two blocks south.  She shook her head in disgust.  She was going to have to listen to some inspiring tunes, like maybe “You Only Live Twice”, in order to sort out and identify this interesting but unknown spiritual element. 

Maybe there would be a stray dog or something hanging out behind Butte Central High on Galena.  Her hunger was going to have to be assuaged one way or another before she could muster the necessary concentration to figure this thing out.  Pickings were so slim in this town these days it was almost enough to make you pack it in.  If only the mines were still open.  The tangy aftertaste of copper dust that she used to feel dancing across her tongue after drinking from a miner was a delicacy that was sorely missed around here these days.

A POEM IS WHAT YOU WRITE IN BED

a poem 
is what you write in bed oops 
I already said 
that  I write in blood 
on the bed a flood 
of red from my head 
comes red writing 
it's exciting but if I'm verbose 
I'm dead  drained 
at the vein 
(or am I just being morose?) 
composing in blood 
is tricky  let's face it 
you can't erase 
an error  too sticky 
to rub out with hair 
or carefully smear 
with nightshirts 
besides a severed vein spurts 
sprays the air  messes 
the lines and hurts 
so sleep in the bed 
instead  don't write poems 
after hours  and in the morning 
shower.




originally published in the April 1991 issue of FEH! A JOURNAL OF ODIOUS POETRY (issue #9).  Reprinted here without any permission whatsoever - it's my poem, and the magazine is long out of business.  Sorry, Simeon.

The Abysmal Adventures of Porno Rabbit and Cracky the Corpse - Lesson Four

Ralphie was standing in an overtly defensive position; her nose was so wrinkled up that her entire face looked like it was sucking into itself. In front of her the brackish water in a rusty old barrel was reflecting the harsh light of the single bulb that swung overhead.


“Smells like horse piss,” she said. “Old horse piss. Not even fresh.”


Ayzook was grumbling under his breath. He wasn’t quite tall enough to even see into the barrel. But he wasn’t really happy with Ralph’s cooperation, so far.


“Just read it, or whatever it is that you do, will you? Aren’t you supposed to be able to connect to any living dead spirits that are in the area? Besides you, I mean. I have about all the connection to you that I need.”


Ralph straightened up, towering three feet over Ayzook. “You really should show some respect, dear,” she said. “I could probably make my foot big enough to stomp you into the dirt, even though it’s so cramped in here I might have a hard time raising my leg high enough.”


The druid knew there was no upside to pissing off an angel, even a defrocked one. “Okay, okay. But be a little helpful, would you please?”


Ralphie leaned over again, putting her face closer to the barrel. “Do you think it would help the situation if I just threw up in it?” she asked.


Ayzook was huffing and puffing but didn’t say a word to Ralph. She looked like she was concentrating a little bit as she gave her attention back to the fifty-five gallon “well of souls”.


“Well there are traces of a couple dozen beings here in Butte that fall into the ‘dead with an asterisk’ category. What am I looking for again exactly?”


“Like I said, one of them has the sacred pouch with all of my poker machine money in it. I’m sure of it. Either that or that God damned dog buried it somewhere. And I think he’s too lazy to go to the trouble. Probably just passed it off to the first person or thing that approached him, and I’m betting that would be some sort of deceased entity.”


“Hmm. Sacred purloined pouch in the possession of a putrid pooch. I see, I see . . .” Ralphie was smirking but seemed to be directing at least some of her attention towards the dilapidated barrel of filth. “You and your ill-begotten casino cash. Maybe somebody from the reservation reclaimed it.”


“If I don’t have that money back by the end of the week, you will be living in this shithole of a cave by yourself,” Ayzook said rather bitterly. “They don’t give me anything to work with around here. Butte, Montana. Feh. This is ridiculous. Even old Fuzzy Pizzle, over in Minot, has a better gig than this. And he had his nose bit off by a dragon five hundred years ago, or so the story goes. He can’t even go out in public without a patch. But he isn’t stuck in Butte.”


“Don’t go knocking Butte,” Ralphie admonished. “This may not exactly be the crown of creation, but there are worse places out there, believe me. I have probably passed out in the gutter in most of them. Butte’s good people.”


Before Ayzook could say anything, Ralph’s eyes narrowed and she again assumed a posture of concentration. “Wait a minute,” she said. “There’s something here, I think.”


Ayzook was working his stubby little legs, trying to jump up and get a look into the murky barrel. “What is it? What!” he demanded.


“Well,” said Ralphie, standing up and stepping back, “there seems to be some presence here in Butte which matches up to the emanations of that pouch. It’s an undead thing, but I am not getting a name or any real identifying features. Except that the dead brain waves are pretty weak.”



“What does that spell?” asked Ayzook anxiously.


“It means the creature is in bad shape, or else it means he is some sort of fucking idiot,” said Ralphie. “I guess either way he is in bad shape. But it’s harder to get a definite location than if he was fully functional.”


“I need to find this thing!”


“I know, I know, jack down a yard, will you Zookums? We can hit the trail and probably track him down. Unless he decays into a puddle of stinky slime before we get there. He’s pretty screwed up, it looks like to me. But the aura should be trackable. And his only connection to the sewer dog might be that they fought over the same rancid old cow leg or something.”


“Okay, let’s go!” Ayzook was practically squealing. His voice became embarrassingly high pitched when he was excited. “I want to find that pouch!”


“We need to wait until the morning. It can keep.”


“Why? Why wait?”


Ralphie yawned, stretched, and scratched herself in a very unladylike fashion. “I’m too tired for this right now. It takes energy. We can pursue this business in the morning. Late morning. Maybe closer to noon.”


Ayzook was fuming, but he knew his impatience would get him nowhere; better to ruminate on the situation and develop a plan for reacquiring his cash. How much money could a retarded dead man spend overnight in Butte, after all?


“Fine,” he said as he turned and stomped noisily out of the room. “We can track down this thieving corpse creature tomorrow.”


The angel was now concentrating on pulling the bottle of Old Grand Dad out of her robes. From the hallway Ayzook called back to her.


“Put the lid back on that barrel of Lost Souls when you’re done in there. And DON’T piss in it!” Ralphie just looked at him and wrinkled her nose.


He really did wish he was in Minot about now.

THOSE COWS LIVING IN MY OLD HOUSE

You simply cannot imagine what it is like to return to your old house and discover that it has been overrun by cattle.

I went back to see the old place but the New World Order of the Immaculate Bovine Conception had rolled over it just as they have so many of our most precious and sacred of institutions, icons and monuments.  Somebody told me there were polled herefords sprawled out inside the Lincoln Memorial.  Can you even imagine such a thing?

Anyway I went into the old house and the kitchen was full of pies.  But nobody had baked them.  Cows on the staircase.  I didn't know they could even do that.  Can a cow lay in your bed?  Well if she does it smashes everything into oblivion except maybe your worst nightmares, I can tell you.  Those will just be multiplied.

I lost count when trying to determine how many there were in the old house.  I was scared to go down to the basement because I was hearing these haunting "MOO" sounds coming up the stairs.  This whole business is most disconcerting because I know for a fact that the ghosts of many of my ancestors reside in that house.  And I know they wouldn't give the place up without a fight.  I'm betting that between the cows and the spooks there is probably a "Marco" and "Polo" type of thing going on day and night - only its "Moo" and "Boo."

One of the worst things about the New World Order Cow is that in spite of all their uppity airs and notions, they still can't help but stand around with that same look on their faces.  You know the one.  It's in the eyes, mostly.  The eyes and that sideways sliding mouth business.  Who chews their food sideways, I ask you? What sort of deity could design something like that with a straight face?  Probably on the original cow prototypes they just had the poop falling out of the sides of their heads and plopping on the ground.  It would make about as much sense.  And then there's the multiple stomach factor - oh, please, I beg you; don't get me started on that!

So I stood in the living room of my old house and stared a cow straight in the face as she stood there using her crap encrusted tail to swat flies.  No shame at all.  There were no flies in this house in the old days.  And no poop stuck to anything either.  For the most part.

It occurred to me that this cow's face looked almost exactly like my drunken old Uncle Harold, long dead and gone and may his soul rest peacefully even after the crap he pulled on me.  He had the same thing going on with the eyes.  And the sagging jowls, in his case a byproduct of all the years of sucking on a bottle of Christian Brothers brandy or maybe Mogen David wine.  Even though he was mostly on a liquid diet he  would still eat something sometimes; he was almost toothless and when he did eat he generally chewed his food kind of sideways.  How did I not make this connection before?  When I was driving the truck at harvest time he would be on the combine careening wildly through the fields, boiled to the limit, swerving and running over hay bales and grinding the header into the dirt.  Then when he was dumping grain he would come up to the window of the truck to say he had "lump jaw" and he would just spit a peach pit in through the window of the truck and into my lap.  Couldn't you just see some cow pulling something like that?

I never go anywhere without a gas mask these days.  This methane thing has gotten so out of control it is ruining everyone's lives.  The penguins are all heading back to the North Pole - you will say "Now wait, the penguins live primarily around Antarctica, not up north" and you would be right but not anymore.  They are all heading back to the North Pole.  It's portentous as hell, it means something but none of us can figure out what.  Very ominous indeed.  Personally I think it's a sign we are rocketing towards the End Days of Dairy Doom and Despair.  You won't find that one on your calendar but believe me, it's there.

Why in hell are we talking about penguins?  I have cattle living in the old house, the house where I grew up, the house where when I was a lad, for fun the ghost of my great-great grandmother would pop up in front of me out of nowhere just to see the wet poop drizzle down my legs.  Well I hope her daffy sense of humor has prepared her for this dark day.

Are there really four stomaches in a cow?  I didn't want to talk about this - but are there?  Or is it a trick?  Really is it just one stomach with four chambers, like the heart has chambers?  I'm pretty sure that cows don't even have hearts.  What use would they have for them?

I'll tell you what they do have now.  World dominance.  The Great Cow Birth, the Bovine Immaculate Conception.  It changed everything and now the cows are at the top of the food chain so to speak.  Well so be it even though, like my Uncle Harold, they don't really eat any food.  They just chew on whatever they happen to belch up from Stomach Numero Uno, coming right up alongside all that global warming methane gas.

But I'll tell you what - I am conspiring nowadays with some of the ghosts of my ancestors in hopes of ridding the family home of the accursed cows.  Most of the ghosts in my family have all grown fat and complacent and usually they spend all of their time trying to scare the soupy britches off anybody who happens by, and also performing cheap dimestore stunts like flying through closed window panes and yelling "CRASH!" really loud each time they glide effortlessly through.  I am explaining to them that this sort of thing might be funny as hell in the pages of a Casper comic book but here and now it is gaining them nothing.

We have hopes of herding the cows out.  We know they don't respond to the usual ghostly antics like opening and closing cupboard doors, making light fixtures swing, blowing out candles (uppity cows don't even have command of fire), displaying disembodied footprints which appear out of nowhere, or even something as drastic as making the radios suddenly come on at three in the morning with the volume turned way up and Laverne Baker singing "Soul on Fire" with so much angst the walls practically bleed.

What we have learned is that cows are truly terrified of only one thing:  Milk chocolate.

Chocolate, it seems, is like some dark brown apocalyptic demon substance that possesses their milk and turns it the color of mud - and makes it desirable to people everywhere.  For you see - and this just rocked me to learn - the damned cows' most fervent desire is to reclaim all of the milk and the unholy bonding of their sacred substance with chocolate is beyond blasphemy.  The milk is part of the religious foundations of the New World Order of the Yadda Yadda, you know what I'm talking about.  Anyway, they are trying to get back all the milk the same way some Christians are determined to gather up all of those thirty pieces of silver that bought out Jesus at the Gethsemane Slave-o-Rama and Swap Meet way back when.

And as far as immaculate conceptions go, consider this - who was present in that manger way back when Modern Christian Thought popped out of the ethereal womb and into our hopes and prayers?  I'll tel you who.  Cows. There were cows in that manger.  Just think about that for a minute, if you dare.

Tomorrow me and the ghosts are going to quietly plant hundreds and hundreds of Hershey bars in every nook and cranny of the old house.  They will all be unwrapped and ready to go.  When the first cow sees them, she will start bellowing like some tortured creature that has had its insides hollowed out and then replaced with swiss chard, a.k.a. the Perpetual Spinach of ancient folklore - as foretold, to be wrapped in blessed eggplant and baked into a soft, puffy turnip loaf, the most deadly natural enemy of the cows on this planet.  This will be all watched over by the Three Great Condors who are under contract as lookouts and sentries until this entire mess is finally sorted out.

Am I rambling, does this whole business seem somehow confusing or frustrating?  Does it seem to you like it just doesn't make a lick of sense?  Well what could you expect?  Now you can imagine how I feel, having come back to the old house and discovering that it has been overrun by cattle.

The Abysmal Adventures of Porno Rabbit and Cracky the Corpse - Lesson Three

Most folks were just enjoying their first morning cup of coffee at this hour, but Porno Rabbit was already hard at work.  He was highly motivated by last night’s impromptu delivery of a funny looking bag with big stacks of hundred dollar bills inside, courtesy of his pal Cracky, 97% dead but still perhaps ten or twenty percent useful, depending on your method of measure.

In a vocation not generally known for high ethical or professional standards, Porno liked to think his work stood out, that he was a cut above your average sleazeball scumbag filth-purveying reprobate, a rung or two up the ladder from the gutter-crawling scurrilous wretches who typically pursued this particular calling.  Maybe Porno crawled like a slimy worm across the fat belly of society but at least he tried to do so with some sense of personal pride and dignity.  Eat dog or die, his current motivational mantra, kept echoing about in his brain as he set himself to work.  He tried to push from his mind the fact that Cracky had obviously done both, and probably more recently and frequently than one would care to consider.

He had already made some calls to get the ball rolling on production of his new “art film” starring the mayor of Butte.  He had reviewed the footage that was stored on his hand-held camera. Times had been so tough he had been forced to sell or trade much of his equipment, as well as a big part of his orifice-equipped inflatable doll collection – but the camera was something he would never part with.  He considered it his life’s blood.

He had already called his favorite film editor and arranged to do some production work with him later that day.  He needed a source for mass producing a number of quality prints and he was working on that – he had done a lot of work in and around Butte in the past few years and had managed to develop a halfway decent network of operators.  His internet guy would get to work on some well-placed advertising and maybe a brief spot on youtube (it would be quite innocuous but tantalizingly suggestive as well, if they did it right).  There were other elements he was still piecing together and he was confident he could turn this into a quick money maker of perhaps record-setting magnitude.   Of course it took startup cash to grease the wheels of progress and get all these people and processes in motion.  Thanks to Cracky, he now had more than enough.

He envisioned about a twenty minute production, and reviewing his mayoral footage he was sure he could pull that together with no problem.  The actual footage of the mayor romping through the local den of iniquity would be spliced together with some stock footage of material that Porno considered to be appropriately symbolic or suggestive.  This would include Adolph Hitler giving a heated and maniacal speech while his Nazi horde went goose-stepping across the screen – as well as the usual clips of trains entering tunnels and so forth.  Perhaps he could cap the big moment with an exploding hydrogen bomb scene, filmed in the Nevada desert in the 1940s.  And a soundtrack heavy on appropriately dramatic classical music complete with big kettle drums and cannon fire.  He had a knack for this sort of thing.

Also he was working on a title for this new little masterpiece.  He had thrown around a bunch of options but had pretty much settled on  “Ladies and Gentlemen, Jizz On Her, The Mayor”.  If this was too wordy he might leave off the “Ladies and Gentlemen” part.  He really liked the sound of it though.

The politics of local placement and distribution were important as well – he had to get enough prints of the film out there locally before he actually contacted the mayor. Then when he agreed to sell “His Honor” the original print for a tidy (and hopefully ongoing) sum, there would already be so many copies spread strategically about, that giving up the original (if he actually did so) would be pretty much inconsequential to the whole operation.  Definitely he had to get some prints in the hands of the local biker gang.  The clumsy cogs of local Butte and Silverbow County government would be no match for Porno’s well-oiled machine.

This was just so damned exciting – he had to really work to keep his foot from lapsing into the thumping reaction that he found so pleasant and so disgraceful.  Whatever he might be, Porno really grated at the notion of behaving like the stereotypical cartoon rabbit.  If there was any comparison there at all, he liked to think of himself as sort of a well-hung Bugs Bunny – except one who didn’t spend so much time dressed in drag.

In order to placate Cracky and keep him out of the way, Porno had given him some of the money (not much) so he could go and do whatever it was that he did with money – spend it maybe, but more likely lose it or set fire to it or tear it into little pieces and throw handfuls of it into the breeze.  Porno didn’t really care, as long as he left the ambitious bunny alone.  Part of the investment of capital here was to keep Cracky from screwing up the process.  He thought his dead pal had said something about finding “Mystery Dog” and doing something for him with the money, but Porno hadn’t really been paying too much attention at that point.  He didn’t know or care what Cracky could do for the stupid dog.  If he wanted to get that mongrel a shampoo and a trim,, or maybe a nice acidic sheep dip, it seemed like a worthwhile activity to Porno.

Porno was also savvy enough to know that whoever had lost that money was going to be looking for it.  He didn’t really think there was any way they could connect it to him or Cracky, but he wanted to get things going as fast as he could and keep a watchful eye out for signs of trouble.  He was pretty confident that his quick actions probably had him miles ahead of any potential pursuit – unless the money’s previous owner had been up late last night invoking the powers of God Almighty on his behalf.  This odd notion came to him out of nowhere and seemed so ridiculous that Porno couldn’t help but smile at the thought.