Sons of America, Vol. 1

By Lancelot Larsen

After unknowingly befriending a serial killer, a man embarks upon a gruesome adventure that leads him to meeting an otherworldly businessman who offers him the opportunity to expand his dark horizons in an act of terrorism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532010071

Lancelot Larsen

The author lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is his second novel.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 Lancelot Larsen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1006-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1007-1 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 11/04/2016

Contents

Bodies Drowning Pool

I Don’t Like Mondays The Boomtown Rats

In League With Satan Venom

She Took an Axe Flotsam and Jetsam

Life of Crime The Weirdos

Am I Evil? Diamond Head

Killer Clown Joe Mystery Group

Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good! Megadeth

Psycho Eddie Noack

Jack the Ripper Screaming Lord Sutch

In the Air Tonight Phil Collins

Behind Blue Eyes The Who

Tom Dooley The Kingston Trio

Lizzie Borden Chad Mitchell Trio

Folsom Prison Blues Johnny Cash

I Wanna Be a Unabomber The Donnas

Comin’ Back for More C.W. McCall

Zodiac The Melvins

The End The Doors

The Nobodies Marilyn Manson

Weile Waila The Dubliners

Ted, Just Admit It Jane’s Addiction

Bohemian Rhapsody Queen

Halt Rammstein

Burn Nine Inch Nails

Bloodstains Agent Orange

Nebraska Bruce Springsteen

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer The Beatles

Bind, Torture, Kill Suicide Commando

Jeremy Pearl Jam

Kill the Poor Dead Kennedys

Pretty Polly Coon Creek Girls

Trouble Elvis Presley

Doubt The Cure

Ace of Spades Motorhead

Shit List L7

Wild Side Motley Crue

Nightcrawler Judas Priest

Honey Hush Johnny Burnette Trio

The Night Stalker Bewitched

Attack of the Mad Axeman Michael Schenker Group

Diddy Doo Wop (I Hear the Voices) Hall and Oates

You’re Gonna Kill That Girl The Ramones

Deep Red Bells Neko Case

Break Stuff Limp Bizkit

So What Ministry

People = Shit Slipknot

Bad Leroy Brown Jim Croce

Midnight Rambler The Rolling Stones

Angel of Death Slayer

Running Gun Blues David Bowie

I’m Your Boogie Man Rob Zombie

Bloodbath in Paradise Ozzy Osbourne

No One Is Innocent The Sex Pistols

Hitchhiker Joe The Rugburns

Killboy Powerhead The Offspring

48468.png

The more I looked at people, the more I hated them because I knowed there wasn’t any place for me with the kind of people I knowed… A bunch of Goddamned sons of bitches looking for somebody to make fun of… some poor fellow who ain’t done nothin’ but feed chickens. Charles Starkweather

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

48473.png

Bodies Drowning Pool

How does it feel to listen to someone laugh at something that isn’t funny?

The sons of bitches of this town can go funny themselves to death for all I care. Civilization was a punch line. They waited six days so they could have one day to laugh off everything they did to build it. Now, the joke was on them. Boy, Captain Howdy, did they laugh.

There they were, a few seconds short of non-existence, thinking they knew everything, asses uptight and forthright, captains of industry and those who labor for industry. Those bitches of bitches, great and small, thought they could control the world with their pulse alone. No original thoughts. No clear conscience. Just drive. All they wanted in life was to put someone down. It didn’t matter if it was a big flush of stinking words from where they chew. It didn’t matter of it was with a big bag of money. Killers, man-eaters, and tribal carnivores in the concrete jungle, them all. Three hundred million excuses for pride and prejudice. Sinners in the hands of an angry God. Pushy, bossy, and in need of a good clean restroom. Foreign food on a fancy plate to show everyone that before life’s gone in an act that makes them samples of all Men are created equal, they can, for one fleeting moment, feel like royalty in a civilization of mediocrities eating for under ten bucks. Those who eat the value meal and buy burgers for a buck in a truck find their own excuses to play the same game. It doesn’t matter if they wear Chanel and bet on Riverbread at the Kentucky Derby. It doesn’t matter if they wear Mal-Wart and peel a sticker off a white Dixie cup at the Golden Arches.

In one instant, they all laughed themselves to death. Except this time, for a change, they weren’t laughing at celebrities and politicians. Random non-conforming strangers in public. Those who didn’t bicker, snickered. Even they weren’t snickering at others. They laughed at the air and for no reason at all. A bunch of bitches trained like bitches in heat to laugh at things that weren’t funny. Even throughout their lives, they laughed for no reason. Now they were laughing when a joke was not being told or not in the company of someone society told them was a living joke to be laughed at.

The comedy began with a star falling from the spotlight of the world. It chose Manhattan, Fifth Avenue between Central Park and the Empire State Building. For a series of city blocks, the world was as colorless as a Cold War computer monitor, blue instead of green, even flashing like it planned on crashing. The Blue Death Cloud began as a boyish face about to throw a tantrum entertaining for socially qualified adults. Deepened the brow; fallen the mouth. The pensive visage developed into a dark eye. Its throbbing bolts of veins shot apart into a looming pyramid of suffocation below.

The screams from those on sidelines, unaffected or had not been yet, were reflected in the horrified faces behind shop windows and vehicle windshields, watching the atonal mass chorus of dying people laughing as loud as they could, high-pitched like they were singing a song before closing their monstrous mouths for good. Dying like living. Laughing themselves to death without a smile. Thousands fell to the street, all sharing similar ugly, stupid expressions on their faces, the shock of being confronted with that which cannot be explained. What happened? Why me?

Humanity’s legacy includes men hacked to pieces, women mouthing horrible things to people they didn’t know, and the cold, dead eyes of children who gained experience in unrepeatable ways. But this incident truly tore at the conscience in an unspeakable manner.

If the son of bitches of this town thought life was a joke, then life joked back: A news helicopter, a cat, and a celebrity crashed on the streets of Manhattan, and everyone laughed at the news of the world that collided with a freight truck to stop traffic, cut a FedEx man in half to interrupt delivery, dismember a doctor’s arm that rolled to a gutter blocked by the corpse of a well-dressed workaholic, and give oral surgery to a bum who used to use his mouth to return dishes in restaurants; the furry orange apartment princess, having bounced off the glass doors of a business office where dreams of wealth and status were rudely interrupted, fell upon the head of a thug and scratched his eyes to lead him into the burning news and delivery wreckage and become enflamed enough to use his gun to fire eight random shots at a fashion boutique window and a professional athlete who was running unsuccessfully for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and the Dancing With the Stars corpse, dressed only in yellow shorts with princess spelled across her spa-spent ass that was accustomed to a life of sitting and waiting for something incomprehensible while being despised by her television sets because of it, flew feet first into the windshield of a tanker transporting acid–which tipped it sideways upon a black limousine producing a banking president who screamed because the skin of face had melted off, eyes and teeth intact, and he already missed his Italian suits, tennis clubs, island weekends, and spending his life hating strangers while preaching against xenophobia during political discussions—and caused her to lose her diamond ringed finger which poked the left lens of the aviator sunglasses on a motorcycle cop speeding towards trouble but was distracted and directed swiftly into the bullet-ridden fashion boutique where he was decapitated by the window he broke accidentally with the continuing red and blue flashing lights of his two-wheeler that impacted a ladder that caused the boutique owner to fall and become impaled by the outstretched arm of her immovable mannequin while the others looked out the broken window without a care in the world as their human counterparts fell at their feet with interrupted intentions of opening other glass doors, such as store clerks leaving their registers wide open with no one to take advantage and children dropping ice cream cones in front of falling parents bathing under a destroyed hydrant wasting water upon gurgling expressions of horror.

The stink of blood and tooth decay in unwashed mouths infected the lunchtime air long after the collective laughter died. The white shadow of two titanic hands, transparent and glowing, rolled back to the tops of the tall buildings that made Manhattan a play land of convenience and a laboratory for rats. Even the rats died alongside the hands of their experimental doctors.

The Blue Death didn’t put just the traffic and the money-changing to a halt. The death metal of arrogance was on pause. Under the stillness and the silence, the sons of bitches had a chance to try to be noble and perfect as a group again, understanding, hopefully once and for all, that they were never the Universe themselves nor its masters.

I wanted to ask, Why did it have to happen? But my actual question is my confession. Why was I entertained by watching it?

I Don’t Like Mondays The Boomtown Rats

To Whom It May Concern,

What you just read is the first and a sample of an alarming series of emails that I received less than a week ago.

It is a message to the ones who master the world and their minions. Be he a magician, master illusionist, dark artist, or mad scientist, the messenger has blown smoke in their faces. The air that gives man life has become the air that takes it away. The message is that it is time, an affront to the world that the messenger is here and is expecting his world.

I have brought the emails to the attention of Father Aloysius Time who asked me to print and package them for delivery to you. I am serving Father Time in this matter, as his health does not permit him for travel at this time.

I am aware that you have not spoken to Father Time since shortly after he quit his religious studies post at Bellum Bibamus Boarding School. More specifically, I know you helped him create Confession.org. Since Father Time had been bed-ridden for more than two weeks, I have been using your joint email address to assist with the confessions. Father Time was diagnosed with hand and foot cyanosis. Sister Yumi Takigawa told me the cause was overexertion.

I first want to say that I admire what both you and Father Time started, even so it was met with great disapproval from unmentionable sources. I think it is a beneficial concept for those busy children of our Lord who wish to clear their consciences but are not likely to travel to a local church and feel squeamish before a stranger, even if of the cloth. As you would know, I know that a confession is not legitimate in this way, and this fact is explained to all concerned. But I felt it was something to at least encourage a lessening of the tensions between our Lord and His children.

Confession.org is now comprised of a small group of volunteer ordained and lay priests who read online confessions and counsel as needed. Mostly, I have been doing general office work, but I was asked this one time to tend to the confessional email address of you and Father Time. Between us, I still do not know why Father Time did not ask one of the actual priests to help him in this manner. Like our Lord, I am sure his reasons are logical but wrapped in a comforting cloud of mystery.

As mentioned, I alerted Father Time to recurring emails from four different children of our Lord, including three other single emails from three related and non-related persons. They are inexplicably astonishing, to say the least. They became a building of a building within Confession.org, a white whale of a tale, so to speak. The thing is not so much that the tale occurred but why it occurred which no one that I know of knows but perhaps Father Time and, more than likely, you.

From what I have read in the emails of seven persons directly or indirectly involved in the prior email, there is an obvious connection. Father Time has made it his responsibility to discover the source of the connection among these emails. He would like your assistance in this pressing matter.

Quo Vadis.

Your humble servant,

Brother Armando Cane

[e-mail]

PS: I have addressed this communication as To Whom It May Concern should I encounter some unnatural misfortune rendering this package to someone other than its intended audience. If you, the reader, should find this package of printed emails, then something unjust has occurred to me. Should you care that these critical communications be joined with its rightful owner, then I plead that you notify Confession.org. Should you care about these communications in any way other than their safe delivery to their intended audience, be forewarned that you and your injurious intentions are equally expected and just action has already been orchestrated.

In League With Satan Venom

Dear Father Time,

I continue my confessions from the AMC Loews Lincoln Square Theater lobby, 1998 Broadway, while awaiting the four-twenty pm showing of 2012, amongst other titles: That Evening Sun, Endgame, The Messenger, The End of Poverty, Women in Trouble, Oh My God, and The Other Side of Paradise. I would have rather had seen The Box, but this place and hour had been selected for us for reasons I shall convey in due time. Perhaps my chance to see The Box will come later. It was a challenge for me to return to the Lincoln Plaza fountain, since it is here where we were first almost caught. But, still, my identity was safe behind the religious costume, much to my astonishment.

A little girl with a Johnny Raws plush toy just ran into my leg… already a look of desperation on such a visage of youth. She ran away before I could ask why.

Upon departing the Museum of Natural History, I was clothed with melancholy as if I were dead already. The last thing at which my compatriot and I viewed were the two wolves in the dark in the snow. And that image shall stay with me until tomorrow, for a wolf in the night in the snow was what I had become. I stopped wresting sperm whales long ago, suffocating in a black liquid space without time, doomed to fail and sink into the abyss. I became a hunter, a beast with a short and brutish life that felt extended only in its meaningless. But it shall be over tomorrow, and I shall have made my last statement to the lands and seas of Earth: That I was here, and I intended to take the life that was never given me.

Like I never existed and had done nothing offensive to the human race, I walked calmly and aimlessly in my religious costume unto Columbus Circle. No one seemed to care who I was, from where I came, or for what I planned the next day.

I saw a copy of the Village Voice and took it for no reason but morbid curiosity. Why morbid? On the cover was a portrait of Lou Dobbs whose head was harpooned by a Yank flag next to well-dressed hippies happy underneath the carnage.

Leviathan Returns it stated.

The last news-man on Yank soil who stood for Yankland fantastically slain by those who stood only for hypocritical intangible ideals, including tolerance for everyone but the elderly and the overweight and civil rights for everyone but the working poor. So many cities in Yankland were full of liberal parties attended by males and females who a-jerketh themselves about the down-trodden with their hands and a-laugheth at their living conditions with their mouths. What else but Hollywood and Broadway would create stories that cry for the working poor and make money from cheap laughs regarding their lifestyle? How many children in the rural South shall never receive the chance to see the world for what it is beyond jerbs that make them feel like shit and school-classes that teach them an assortment of horse-shit isms?

There is a peace that has existed in the world since the beginning of time, and these children shall never gain the opportunity to discover it. For them, opportunity means making money for the sole purpose of feeling superior or receiving enough money to buy media and contraptions that incite hate for whoever sits or stands next to them in public. Give an unguided child tasteless cinema, violent video games, Internet pornography, insult-humor-based cartoons, and a bong (or a V-8), and I shall give you a menace to society. A few are naturally prepared to guide themselves through the commerce that sees fit that children fall at an early age, and that their peers laugh when they do. But most are not. Neither the New Republic nor the Village Voice understands that it is not the violent video games to blame, it is the lack of respect for other human beings presented by parents when they curse at other drivers while sitting in traffic to get to Scary Movie 3 at eight o’clock or berate the clerk at Electronics Boutique or laugh when their favorite television funny-man thinks it is cool to kill Palestinians or suck male genitalia when they seek a discount on their illegal narcotics drugs.

Vegetable juice is only salvation in a can in a society needing salvation that comes neither from tin or flesh nor with a price-code partially inflated by advertising and free food-cards for undocumented immigrants seeking economic salvation from a tin-poor nation.

I did not have to open the Village Voice to read its politics, for I have lived with it for most of my life. The pages of the Village Voice would like its readers to resurrect the discussion of AIDS but does not want to entertain the notion that perhaps a life of piety is a better cure for that disease, as well as scores of other communicable misfortunes such as depression and sweat-shops. Yet, they still find self-fulfillment in designer clothing and the struggle to fit their precious bodies into them.

I have seen two devils in Yankland: one is the Liberal; the other is the Conservative. One creates poverty; the other is cool enough to talk about how bad it is, but too cool to associate with the victims of it.

A man who has seen the world for what it is only needs to open the pages of the Village Voice for one reason alone: Night-life. A wise man once said, Everybody’s working for the weekend. It is a wise saying from an unreliable source, but it is true. Who works for the working poor? Who works for the children of the sweat-shops? Who works for the AIDS cure? Who works to make big little females feel good about their big, big bottoms? Who works for you?

No one.

If anyone says I do, he or she is bearing false witness… and have been for at least the last four decades of which I know: The same problems—tired and old—make the head-lines of the Village Voice staffed—fresh and bold—by progressive pups salivating over a blue plate special of liberality to be right in political heart and social mind.

The Voice is advertising; the priesthood is a jerb; the charity professional is a well-paid complainer; and one’s dormitory buddy, who spends his days as a presidential campaigner, is really working for the mob.

No one is working for anyone because everyone is working for the weekend.

Everyone talks about crime in the winter and the economy in spring. And when the summer is over and the children’s backs are at the walls in school, everyone talks about money and punishment all over again.

We happened upon a clever dining enterprise with a brilliant literary homage: Jekyll and Hyde. I looked at the Village Voice, then the restaurant again. This caused me to think about how most of the makers of the news-paper and most of its readers would believe my compatriot and I were both stupid for entertaining the idea of entering an establishment such as this for our last meal on Earth, one dining experience so comical and childish and commercial.

But I did not agree with the nay-saying voice.

I liked the imagination involved in this place, primarily its theme that combined the supernatural with exploration. None of the articles in all the annals of the Village Voice shall ever produce anything as timeless as the masterpiece upon which this culinary experience was created. If anyone asked me what was the greatest tragedy of our age now, I would say that it was the death of the creative spirit. I cast eyes upon the Spirit of Creation in the other-worldly cultural curiosities above its doors alone. And as I looked again upon the Village Voice, I realized that it was not necessarily only technology that slew the Spirit of Creation in the world, but it was the loss of the will to remain innocently hopeful and youthful in a kindly manner. It is not a nose full of Bolivian marching powder that makes one lose one’s innocence, but the will to subjugate and subordinate. There are too many captains on the ship wanting to smoke the Chinaman’s pipe and a-fucketh the beer-wench. Who shall keep the ship clean and raise a hammer so as to make it more beautiful and bountiful for a multitude of stormy voyages to come?

I would have preferred to spend this hour at another museum such as MoMA; alas, oftentimes hunger supersedes beauty. Thus, into the Jekyll and Hyde restaurant we ventured.

And what a wise choice it was.

Being two white bachelors with supposedly non-friendly countenances, our curt white twenty-one-year-old female host led us up the faux Nineteenth Century stair-case to the library section, bypassing the more entertaining dining area of the main floor, forgoing any tour-guide speeches. Momentarily, we were delayed in being seated because two twenty-one-year-old Anglo-Saxon females blocked the narrow path of the library. They had been standing and texting while talking about a link to an article about PETA using drone-technology to monitor hunters, to whom they referred as ignorant red-necks.

No mention of this subject appeared in this week’s edition of the Village Voice for me to expound further. And, on account of our table being surrounded by false or forgotten old books and a skeleton encased in glass, I could neither expound upon the speeches, songs, laughter, and general commotion from the main-floor dining area.

What did the Pharaoh’s head have to say?

Our bill was one hundred dollars in food and one hundred in many spirits; and the white twenty-one-year-old female server was a bitch to us. At the end of our might-be final meal, I was about to peruse an article about a Lenzi insurance company and something called dead peasant practices; however, before I could learn what it was, I was made to suffer the absurd conversation of the glass-encased skeleton. It was clothed in the fashion of an Edwardian professor and would not cease in its attempts to communicate with me about nothing of which I could learn about this life… not even the after-life.

Our conversation unfolded like so:

Oh! said the plastic skeleton with a phony German accent, as its red eyes illuminated and the prefect teeth of its jaw dropped. Zis is a treat! Velcome and shalom, gentlemenches!

Thank you, I said to the skeleton, slightly amused and slightly annoyed. At first, I could not understand why the skeleton said shalom and addressed us as gentlemenches. But I still could not remember that I wore a costume which would invite such words from tribesman not usually from areas south of the Equator.

Nevertheless, true or false, I decided to converse with the skeleton for the experience of the absurd. What can I say? I was intoxicated by this time. My compatriot only looked blankly at me from time-to-time and did not join us. I think he was too concerned with digesting his boneless short ribs and Bikini Murder to become fully amused by this exchange.

Reading in the library! the skeleton exclaimed. How studious!

No matter where; no matter what, I said. Be always a student of human life.

Vat vere you having for dinner?

Dead flesh from a beast of cloven hoof.

Oh! How rebellious! Vat temple do you go to?

We do not go to temple.

Vat is that? Vat? Vat?

Listen, Mr. Skeleton, we might be having our last meal tonight. We do not need to spend it talking to you at the moment. We have all eternity to talk to you tomorrow afternoon.

Tomorrow afternoon? Vat are you talking about? Vat is going to happen tomorrow afternoon?

We might be dead tomorrow morning. And we shall see you in the hot country then. So, there is nothing you have to say to us now that you cannot say tomorrow afternoon.

Vat? Hot country? Vat makes you think I am in this ’hot country’?

Man, if you made it to Paradise, you would not be hanging around in this restaurant talking to strangers about tasty food in which you cannot indulge with a tongue you do not possess. When it comes to the pleasures of the culinary arts, teeth alone do not cut it.

Vy are you going to be dead tomorrow morning?

We are planning on gassing a few thousand human beings to death, if we are fortunate enough to do so. If we are unlucky, then we might get gassed ourselves.

Mr. Skeleton did not know what to say, but its eyes were still lit and its jaw still open.

Got anything to say to us about that, Mr. Skeleton? asked my compatriot.

It shut down after that, but we were not disturbed afterwards. I can only guess that whichever employee was assigned to the task of operating the skeleton assume we were in jest and no longer possessed the intestinal fortitude to continue our unappetizing conversation.

Oh well, what are you going to do?

Who knew? someone shall say the day after. I am certain.

At least we did not get selected upon which to be picked like the one solitary man sitting in the main room with the undead rock band, werewolf, and explorer-in-a-pot. I overheard relentless pot-shots at his expense for eating alone, as if that were some imaginary crime.

While we waited for the bitchy waitress to quit taking her sweet-ass time (and she did have quite the set of sugar lumps behind her) and deliver us the bill, I looked at the Village Voice for the only aforementioned positive resources upon its depressing pages: the calendar section.

I saw an advertisement that immediately piqued my interest: a band, Les Sans Culottes, performing at a venue nicely named The Mercury Lounge. Having had a strong interest in the French Revolution while in college, there was no way I could not want to witness a band with such a name.

So, we departed the scene of our last supper, and Mr. Skeleton said nothing about our death-conversation, and no one noticed that we ever existed for one hour in the Jekyll and Hyde library. But I noticed them all, the happy lot, laughing and eating underneath all the plastic images of thousands of years of nightmares made into stories for commercial purposes.

Most humans are Hyde dressed as Jekyll, but my compatriot and I are all Hyde all the time. So we were quite comfortable in our honesty while showing our hides to the restaurant as we continued towards better things.

For our meeting with Red, Mr. Job Offer specified the four-twenty pm showing of 2012 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square Theater. It was during this showing that we would be given keys to a pest-control van and two card-keys to a luxury suite at the Double Dane Hotel. For an undisclosed reason, we were advised not to check-in until after six pm.

Unfortunately, Red decided not to arrive at the aforementioned movie-time until thirty minutes before the end-credits; therefore, we were forced to sit through more than two hours of poorly plotted end-of-the-world absurdity.

Then again, one could apply this experience to summarize human life.

In addition to the van and room keys, as well as a voucher for a free breakfast at the Adonis Room, Red provided us with two large dispenser sodas and a bucket of heavily buttered pop-corn.

Without a word, he finished the last half hour of the movie and the pop-corn with us. I figured I might as well see how the movie ended.

Red had nothing to say about anything. He disappeared.

Having had another hour to kill before 2012, I decided to pay my last respects to Werot Records. The flag-ship store was not far across the street, and I have always wanted to see the upstairs sound-proof Classical department about which I heard from management at the Sunset store.

Alas, the ship had already been sinking daily into the pavement.

As foretold by the red and yellow store closing signs, the escalators had been deactivated and defended against human use. Even the downstairs area where Video had once been emptied. All remaining product rested in ramshackle rows beneath hand-written eighty-per-cent-off signs. The tremendous illumination within the two-storied structure of naked glass and aging steel only further encouraged the notion that a collapse could occur at a moment’s notice.

For the Auld Lang Syne, I perused the one hundred surviving Classical CDs afloat one of a hundred shelves awaiting retirement.

No sooner than I started down 666 Memory Lane, a man approached me with these words:

Excuse me, sir. Can you help me find Beethoven Symphony Number Nine?

It did not take long, and I was actually pleased that I could find what I believed to be the best recording: Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Unfortunately, no ultimate recording of Beethoven’s Ninth, in my humble opinion, exists. Three or four of the best have each their own ideal elements missing from the others. However, I would conclude that Mr. Reiner’s interpretation, overall, is the best. Of course, I could be stating this simply because it was the first recording of the Ninth I ever owned. I bought a five-dollar RCA Papillion Series copy from the Wherehouse on Sunset Boulevard when I was a junior in high school and just discovered A Clockwork Orange.

Being in my Hasidic Jew costume, I did not understand why this man believed that I was employed by Werot Records. But I did not have the heart to state the obvious. He was a man who needed his Beethoven. And no living man, no matter how wicked and deathly, who appreciates Lovely, Lovely Ludwig Van could deny another man his right to own a piece of Beethoven’s mind.

And this man was virtually in tears when I placed the CD in his hand. I remember his following words:

I love my son. He’s in prison. And he asked me to get him this music. I don’t care what my son has done. I love him so much. I want to do anything I can to help him. This music will help. I love my son more than anything in the world. Thank you.

As he stared into my eyes with his own pinkening and welling with joyful water, I could not stop my self from feeling an empowering spirit of humanity, an invisible beauty I have not sensed since I was a law-abiding, religious citizen pleased to live a solitary life in pursuit of art and salvation.

I was touched that he replayed his love for his son.

Would you like a sandwich? he asked.

Upon departing the Werot sinking-ship store, the man with the prisoner-son surely did deliver unto me a hero sandwich.

I have loved my wife, the man laughed, since we went to school together. I loved her so much that I wanted a second one of her. We have one son. I’ll love them both forever.

I could describe this man as old-enough-to-be-my-father, a working man, or a son of Montezuma. But I shall not. He was an angel.

My compatriot and I shared this Heaven-sent sandwich while watching the opening credits of 2012. I have never been a connoisseur of Italian meats, but the best salami I ever tasted was inside this hero sandwich I earned by sharing my love for Beethoven and listening to the love of a free father for his captive son.

Unfortunately, 2012 washed away most of my memory of the Mestizo Angel.

True, I remember his tears during the numerous times he pledged his love for his son. Mostly, I was impressed with his unique assessment that he gave life to his son because his love for his wife was too intense to give upon one body. However, as I confess these experiences at this moment, I do not feel the same feeling as I did at the time of occurrence.

Onward moved life. I was unable to stay within that moment.

Unfortunately, moments such as those, being Touched by an Angel, are few and fragile. They do not travel well in the uncertainty of life in the free world.

Funny, the only thing I really remember most was hearing a ring-tone from a phone of one of the movie-goers. It was the Seven Notes in Black from Fulci’s The Psychic. It was rock ‘n’ roll.

The Double Dane Hotel was as long and glossy as any of the other higher-ended hotels. The only distinguishing feature to indicate we were at the right hotel was its unusual logo: twin tall dogs facing west, one behind the other, like it had four legs, one tail, and two heads.

Entering the hotel was a trifle challenge because a crowd of twelve passers-by had gathered around the body of a man lying upon the sidewalk near the glass revolving door that created the optical illusion of the twin dogs looking for something unknown.

The man on the sidewalk was the sort one did not see every day but would cause great curiosity within one such as my self. Bald with a heart-touching white beard, he was clothed in a brown robe with Roman sandals. His eyes were slashed in one long, deep, horizontal, masterful stroke, a brain-destroyer for certain.

I would say the victim was a monk.

I have seen a Buddhist monk once inside Werot Classical. I have seen another on a Greyhound bus. I have only seen Christian monks on television.

I wondered what mission had he to be on Savage Island and receive such a horrifying fate.

A tourist told the television reporter that he saw: It was a man or a woman with long red hair in white business attire, who attacked the face of the victim with a weird-looking knife that came out of the sleeve. The tourist added that he managed a sporting-goods store and hunted all his life but had never seen a knife like the one used for the crime. He appeared more interested in discussing the uncommon knife than the criminal act itself.

It was a man or a woman with long red hair in white business attire: Only one human I know fits this description: Red.

But why? What was the connection?

Did the monk intend to convey a message unto me? Or was this an unrelated incident?

Did another human with lengthy red hair, a white suit, and a cause to kill monks exist on Savage Island?

Between my self and the revolving door of The Double Dane Hotel, the tidy crowd chose not to disperse, and I my self decided to stop to watch. I saw a local news reporter and camera-man discussing the incident. I saw a male wearing a Wolf News letterman jacket making a call on his blackberry. I saw an elderly female wheeling groceries, shocked, almost crying. I saw two yuppies trying hard not to laugh. I could feel disappointment from everyone else, and it did not matter what they did for a living or from where their ancestors hailed or in what stage of life they stood. The strongest time one shall feel time stop is when looking upon a dead body.

Upon watching all these human beings and their concerned or callous or predatory or prayerful reactions to the victim, I thought to myself: There is no democrat versus republican; there is no capitalist versus socialist; there is no Christianity versus Islam; there is no punk versus yuppie; there is no young versus old; there is no rich versus poor; there is no black versus white; there is no Coke versus Pepsi. There are only builders and destroyers: Those who destroy with guns, germs, and steel. Those with black magic, words from diseases mouths. And there are those who build: Those create the science, the art, and the business. And those who keep buildings clean and maintain the machines. Or simply those who mind their own business. The human world is just those with the predatory strain and those with the aptitude for humanity. Just those who respect other human beings and those incapable of feeling humanity.

And why do common men subscribe to such aforementioned dualistic semantics? What does any man who makes millions of dollars care about such petty semantics such as capitalism versus communism or Christianity versus atheism or any other religion? Is that what is meant by Peace on Earth every December?

We sell you diversions like politics, and false hope like upward mobility, so that it is we, the special ones, who reap the peace while you commoners bicker and toil to provide it for us every year of your lives.

In an ideal world, there would be only those who destroy and were meant to be destroyed, until those who destroy live not to destroy no more. We treat the poor, the sick, the old, the meek, the less attractive, the imprisoned, foreigners, and all of the so-called Third World like second-class citizens. History teaches us that it is not such a terrible thing to bully, torture, and kill a second-class citizen. Would it not then be time, in our versus world, that we only deem people as builders versus destroyers and reduce the destroyers to second-class citizenship? They are the true clowns that make a mockery of this fine world and the good human life living upon it.

Therefore, punch the clowns. It is what they deserve.

Clowns come in republican and democrat, Christian and Muslim, black and white, occidental and oriental, capitalist and communist: semantics used as a ruse so that civil humans are incapable of recognizing the clowns.

Empower the civilized half of the masses to recognize the other circus-like half, and encourage them to ignore the clowns for friendship and marriage and seats in Congress, and all of the world’s ills shall disappear within one year. Make the clowns poor and alienated. Drive them into ghettos and prisons and suicide.

If society does not do anything about its clown problem now, there shall always be on the blood-red horizon another such as my self: Faces of Death.

I am a 1978 Volkswagen Beetle that broke down because of too many clowns clamoring to get inside to go to the local video rental store.

An ambulance arrived and ended the show, and I was able to enter the revolving Double Dane door.

I was astonished by its lobby, as I had never once walked inside a hotel as large and illuminated, like it was made exclusively of white gold. The lobby was as spacious and busy as an airport, and I believed I had never been in one public place, not even the Met or Los Diablos Opera, where so many wealthy and attractive humans, of age or of youth, dressed up or down, congregated. I could not even begin to fathom what life must have been like for these humans to travel and lodge at such places so freely.

Of course, check-in was not required, as I already had the room card-key in my possession. And I was rather glad, for I, of course, had no desire to wait in the forty-human line. Above the line of heads staring into their cell-phones or space, I watched an IAMS dog-food commercial upon the panoramic set of forty-inch plasma television screens. It featured a military female in gray camouflage, who scratched the neck of a Great Dane lying atop her between her legs. Whether such body-positioning was intentional or accidental, this IAMS commercial caused me to remember numerous Jack-in-the-Box ones which featured a human female being married to a white clown-faced orb atop a business suit. I once thought that the idea of females being objectified through making them objects of desire by non-human creatures was a current phenomenon. But has been an occurrence since Creature from the Black Lagoon… even earlier, Beauty and the Beast… even earlier, the demented Ancient Greeks and their Minotaur.

I was the only one watching this commercial and would assume that no one in line would have shared such a thought with me regardless of being aware that televisions existed above the reservation desk.

Alas, I turned my attention again toward the lobby. So impressed with this sun-blessed transitioning room, I nearly forgot about the unfathomable underground dwelling, and all of its wealthy participants and sickening meats, I experienced which brought me here.

Our room, on the other testicle, was immaculate but not as glimmeringly expansive as I expected from the lobby. But being one used to only staying in motels and old hotels, it was still roomier, fresher, and easier on the eyes. I saw our Feecey’s tuxedos on the bed (perhaps by Red) … and my two-toned, buckled wing-tips, which appeared brand-new. Perhaps they had been shined by an angelic black Yank; perhaps they were repaired by a clever Chinaman.

Whoever washed the war of my life from these shoes, God bless him.

The tuxedos had been dry-cleaned, and the interior labels had been removed. The only guess I could make for this gap would be based on a book I once read about RFID technology, which suggested that such chips were sewn into clothing tags (for God knows what purpose). Perhaps Mr. Jerb Offer knew more than I could imagine.

Resting for a heavenly spell after the grand repast at Jekyll and Hyde, I activated the glorious fifty-inch HDTV on the wall. Two local channels with news, CNN, and Wolf News, and nothing about li’l ol’ moi. No mention of Chole Kwon at Christmastime or her mystery slaying. No images from Caesar’s Palace. And nothing about anyone I killed, not even Normandie Shields.

Wolf News pretended to be concerned about illegal immigration; CNN applied corporate funding to re-report ad nauseum about Haiti and Japan recovering from their earthquakes. I did not even see a preview-report for the elderly gentleman in the brown robe who was slain not far outside under the soft, warm bed of perfection upon which I rested my weary bones, inquisitive skull, and red eyes.

While I awaited my turn to shower, I watched the last ten minutes of Blue Gold, a documentary about the growing scarcity of drinkable water and future water-wars. I fell asleep on Rango and dreamed that I transformed into an albino lizard kept in an emptied glass Best Foods jar by a male Mexican child who watched the aforementioned movie on an eleven-foot HDTV in a sixteen-square-foot apartment. By the remote-control were three unopened Libros en Espaniol: The Four Agreements and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Before I could read the third title, a drive-by shooting occurred, one bullet making impact upon the emptied Best Foods jar, which caused my soul to jump into the image of the Virgin Mary upon a white velvet couch covering.

I felt unclean knowing I, being what I was, had been positioned to look through the velvet eyes of someone so pure. But all I could do was continue to watch Rango investigating a water-pump until a Mexican female with a vastness of ass in sparkling white tights a-blocketh my view.

The shine from the ass-covering fabric was so bright that it became a lethal sun-burst.

I awakened.

The shower is ready for you, my compatriot overlooked me.

It was the details of the dream that depressed me. Not so much what they were, but that I would have the dream in the first place. Maybe I watched too many movies filled with bad behavior or too high expectations for a fulfilling life. Or maybe I was surrounded by too many humans who watched too many of such movies.

Why could not this dream have been about a boy-lizard in a tropical shirt and a girl-lizard in a white dress, having a picnic in Central Park while discussing automobile insurance?

No matter how crazy my mind had become, my compatriot never once regarded me with questioning eyes like a house-cat… nor did I ever see him regard other humans with the studious eyes of a reptile. His eyes were constant… like a child waiting in a long line to ride a new roller-coaster: staring innocently into space.

Mr. Job Offer suggested we stay in our Hasidic Jew-iforms until the morning of our assignment. But Alley Oop was already sick of wearing it. He dressed his chest and genitalia with the tuxedo instead, protesting the idea of spending his last night on Earth pretending to be something he was not, especially living his whole life being only himself. I agreed. If we were meant to be identified and slain tonight, whether by the Constitution or Dies Irae, then so be it. His attitude was: Party in a tuxedo and let fate decide. Personally, this was my last challenge to call God’s bluff again. I was set to exterminate as many of his sons and daughters as possible; so, this night was His last chance to stop me. My attitude was: Hide in plain sight and wear a tuxedo.

When I saw him take his perpetual date, Geraldine, with him, I kept Truth under the warm embrace of my white-lined tuxedo jacket.

Leaving the Double Dane for a night on the town, I still could not help but think that I should have my head examined for risking my life. Again, I suppose that Mr. Job Offer was right all along: no one remembered my sinful self. No one looked my way once save for the usual young human beings stuffed with co-dependencies and superiority complexes. I was impressed by how oblivious and work-oriented everyone was during the day, but it was a completely different experience for the night-life. All seriousness subsided, and everyone left along the streets of Savage Island had turned into laughter geeks. A lot of yuppies, not too many puppies, but I saw a lot of racist and obnoxious brown, black, and white trash.

Gore Vidal was right: This is the United States of Amnesia.

I did not desire another night at the opera, and it was too late to see a Broadway musical such as Wicked or Mary Poppins or Shrek. However, we did have time to second-act Mary Poppins, which was at the closest theater to us. Thankfully, not one usher or current events enthusiast cared for our presence in the balcony where we had an entire burgundy row to ourselves. And I was further in gratitude that the producer of this Broadway adaptation left out my least favorite scene from the Disney adaptation: I Love to Laugh.

Ugh.

I still think Mary Poppins is an anti-male narrative.

This is what I thought while my compatriot and I a-traineth it south to House-ton Street to witness the French Revolution at the amusement parlor of a Greek god.

Too early still for the revolution-in-music, we started our inebriation at the Coyote Ugly by filling our bellies with seventy-five-cent Pabst Blue Ribbons. I did not see any females dancing upon the bar, as suggested by the forgotten film of its business title; however, I did hear one of the bartenders talk to a male bar-fly about another male bar-fly who offered to pay her three hundred and fifty dollars for one night of her earthly delights. This verbal exchange was the only rowdy and shocking experience I noticed at a venue that was allegedly one hundred per-cent anti-establishment attitude under a line of hundreds of brassieres.

Passing the Sunshine Cinema, I saw on the marquee a Roger Corman retrospective. The posters in window featured: I Escaped From Devil’s Island, The Beast With a Million Eyes, and Monster From the Ocean Floor.

I wondered if I would be able to attend this event on Friday.

Turning forward after viewing this future cinematic event, I accidentally looked upon an older upscale couple (African-Yank male and Asian female) who, for some reason I could not ascertain, laughed with each other as a result, following with an antagonizing public display of affection. They had just exited a place called Final Groceries. I could not say if the female had already planned her kiss after leaving the market, or because she presumed I was the sort of man who was incapable of earning the divine privilege of female companionship.

I confess that my mind would have instinctively dwelled upon this childish behavior had I not noticed an engaging message in yellow, white, and blue: New York Lottery.

Hey, you never know.

Remembering what my compatriot said long ago about perceiving his human victims as lottery tickets, I entered Final Groceries and purchased one for the $660 million prize on Tuesday.

Would I win the lottery or mass-execute on Tuesday?

I heard someone once say that the chances of winning the lottery are so low that one has a better chance of being killed on the way to buying a lottery ticket.

I left the following numbers to Fate: 14, 23, 32, 38, 48, and 51.

Turning to the Mercury Lounge, I was startled by a tall figure appearing like a human male. Ghost white was his skin, and he had no hair from the air above his head to his chinny-chin-chin. He was zombie-like in that he did not seem to know where his body was located in this world. His air of power was not hidden by the coveralls he wore, which were too short and tight for his stature. He was no construction worker. When he started at me for one second, I saw the same eyes as Mr. Job Offer: all encompassing power. I could only step aside for him, for more than his presence, I saw red murder on his left hand. I left him be. Even if he had committed homicide, who would I be to criticize or complain? However, the blood on his hand might alter the course of this world, I had no concern. Tomorrow would be my turn. That was my only concern. Nevertheless, if there was a Great Chain of Murderous Beings, I sensed strongly that he existed upon a higher link than I. A man can tell upon which link of the Great Chain of Being depending on the level of his fear of other men.

While watching Les Sans Culottes at the Mercury Lounge, we saw two Hasidic Jews who attracted a noticeable amount of attention, much more than we did at the Jekyll and Hyde restaurant. I suppose that tourists and family-gatherers in chain-restaurants are more accustomed to men in religious garb, as opposed to hipsters and social liberals in night-clubs. Perhaps religious human beings did not belong at rock shows (although I had a feeling they were not present for the entertainment). But because it was politically incorrect for the hipsters and social liberals to vocalize what they were truly thinking, they were not in danger of being accosted as intolerant or racist in any way. Humans accept the unusual when they are taught a priori that EGBOK (Everything’s Going to Be OK). Otherwise, everyone fears the strange; however, they do not cringe, and some become angry. Everyone fears a young, serious overweight man in a cardigan sweater and tie. The incongruity with the status quo befuddles them, and they react with psychological nausea that causes them to contort their faces and hurl hidden insults and diabolical laughter.

But who among them shall laugh tomorrow?

It was this question that inspired me to awaken to one more day so that so many others shall not, those who have always regarded me coldly as brother but without the br.

Regardless, I reasoned that the two Hasidic Jews possessed some ties to the lounge or were on a business errand with someone within one of the more shadowy areas. They appeared more the type who would rather make money from popular music and merriment than participate in it outside their accustomed rituals such as dancing in a circle while holding hands.

At the table next to ours sat a solitary gentleman wearing a black motor-cap and a black leather jacket. Behind me, I heard a male voice: frogman.

Can you say that a little louder? I heard a female voice.

No one was laughing.

Turning around at the table behind me, I only saw a white horse mask upon the face of one of a trendy group of young party-humans fixated upon Les Sans Culottes.

Too drunk were we to care what would have happened one way or the other, or who a-gawketh or not at whom.

Everyone likes frogs. It is better to have an ethnic slur based on a popular amphibian than a solo sexual activity.

Witnessing Kit Kat Le Noir sing Lolita was one of the greatest moments a man could have before dying. I am glad I was at the right place at the right time and regarded this chance as a kiss from God before leaving Him and the world He created forever. I almost wanted to start life all over again so that I could hear her sing her French song one more time. But then I remembered that this world is one of impermanence, and there were no guarantees of freedom or success or hearing Kit Kat Le Noir sing Lolita one more time. So I decided just to maintain some sense of solidarity and stay committed to our plan for tomorrow.

Afterwards, Kit Kat Le Noir disappeared, and I would never see her again. I felt like the luckiest man in the world to have heard her sing.

Such a good time we had that we decided to stay for the following band (the name escapes me). In between bands, two hours of karaoke was provided.

We started with Blue Hawaiians, and then ended with Captain Morgan and Coke, singing some Andrews Sisters during the transition, thinking about how I used to be both mother and daughtah working for the Yankee dollah.

I did not notice how inebriated Alley Oop had become until he actually decided to sing a song and signed his name as Al in the karaoke note-book. Although he did not explain himself, I believe he had a secret bucket-list which involved an attempt at karaoke.

I watched him search for the Cramps in the song-book while singing to himself: You better ask my mama how to make a monster. Dah-dah-dun. Dah-dah-dun.

I overheard him ask the karaoke overseer if they had what he described as his personal favorite song of all-time: Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols.

That made sense.

He did not tell me which song he selected but insisted that I assist him with the back-up vocals. I did not want to participate, so he treated me to extra shots of Captain Morgan.

The whole time I could only think about how it was interesting it was that to sit and feel alone in a crowded room, while thinking about murdering other humans, sits easier with me than singing a song of love in front of others.

What have we become?

I challenge any of God’s servants or aspirants to answer that one.

Al saw I was suddenly sullen, despite my sauced state; so, he signed Sango, not at my behest, for a song as well. I picked I Love Paris, for it was the only song of which I could think that I could sing well enough.

Are you not concerned about stage-fright, I asked.

Most humans, Al explained, tell you to imagine everyone undressed when having to face a crowd. I pretend I am being watched by the fresh corpses of every human I have ever killed. It’s the satisfaction I feel that motivates me to sing in public.

We waited through a plethora of songs, the good, the bad, and the ugly. A frat-brat selected Tough Enough by the Fabulous Thunderbirds—an expression of the aftermath of the wedding industrial complex—to serenade three young human females who encouraged him with spine-chilling shrieks.

When Al was called, I discovered the song he picked. And I never would have guessed it would be a song by Loverboy.

He could have selected Notorious or The Kid Is Hot Tonight … maybe Heaven in Your Eyes or Destination Heartbreak.

Most humans would have probably picked Working for the Weekend.

His was Lovin’ Every Minute of It.

I sang the O Whoa part and was astonished by his memorization of the lyrics and melody. He did not sing it remarkably well, but there was a conviction in his voice that made the song powerful enough to put the awe in the audience. A lot of flashing female eyes were fixated upon his roulette belt buckle. And when the song was finished, he commented my operatic vocalization and acknowledged that we were more of a hit tonight than we would be tomorrow.

And not once did anyone in the Mercury Lounge recognize us. To them, we were two nobodies.

Believe it… or not.

Life goes on.

It is at this point in this confession that I cannot confess too much, for I do not recall most of the evening after the conclusion of the homage to