Richard, man, I need help. I'm fucked up again, man, and I don't know what to do. I ain't even sure where I am except I'm in the bomber right now, parked next to the dumpster behind some buggy Super Thrift. If I'm in good enough shape to send you this tape, then I probably won't. No meaning to it, if you know what I mean. Maybe someone will figure out how to get it to you, someone with more brains than me.
Why am I recording this message for you? To tell you the truth, I don't know. Guess I need someone to talk to and there just ain't anyone left. Maybe I want you to know, man, want you to understand why your little bro's so fucked up.
But why should you understand? You got your nice little house with blue shutters and chemical lawn and your two kids that you probably taught to say the alphabet backwards like you always did whenever you wanted to make me look stupid. So you probably don't know what it's like when things get too crazy, when the walls of the trash compactor close in. Well, I'm stuck in the trash compactor, up to my neck in shit, the walls are grinding towards me while the rats are dropping down onto my head and clawing at my face and all I can do is scream. You don't understand, do you? But you ought to try, man, because otherwise your kids are gonna turn out like me.
Guess you already heard I left the Buzzards. "Artistic differences" they said. They were a bunch of toad-licking slime pots. Pure and simple. I didn't touch none of that shit then. Makes you crazy. Makes you like one of them, you know.
One night after I crashed down on Danny-boy, maybe a fifth of it, they smeared the shit all over my face. Never mix, they say. Sure better never mix gut-rotting whiskey with that freaky brain slime. When I woke, I was in the desert with Jim, the Indian and Oliver. That's when I freaked. I could feel the desert walls moving in then, just a little and from far away, slow and steady like a mutant turtle on ludes. I freaked. I told Jim where he could put his fuckin fire if he thought he was so hot amd threw sand into the drool dripping down the face of Oliver Flintstone.
The room was totaled. Not like car insurance totaled where they just don't feel like fuckin with it, but totaled. Said I had to pay since I done did it, but it was that freaky toad slime that did it, so they should pay. They kept saying I had some rich brother that'd give me the green, but they don't know you, man. Sorry. Not your fault. Keep forgetting you used to be human before you met that money hoarding tight-cunted wife of yours.
I tried calling you that night, man. I wonder if she even told you. That was the last time I tried to talk to you. She answered the phone, said you weren't in. I gotta talk to Rich, I said, I gotta talk to Rich and she knew I was fucked up. So she says real sweet, what is it Josh, and I'm fucked up, or maybe I'm just shit for brains like you always said, so I tell her I need help, I need money real quick. She doesn't say nothing and I hear your voice in the background talking baby talk. Then she sighs into the phone and says, God help you Josh. We sure can't. That's when she hangs up on me.
Well, I couldn't pay and they sure didn't pay, so the flat-caps threw me in the locker. That's when the walls really closed in. Stone walls with iron grates. I couldn't post bail, so I was stuck there till some pan-fried P.D. drops by when he's finished chasing after real lawyers like you. He gets me to sign some form saying I did something but I won't do it again, at least until the suspended sentence expires. Bet you didn't know your little bro has a sheet. I pray to God you didn't know. But those were the kind of things you always knew. You're the pick of the pricks if you knew and didn't do anything.
I couldn't exactly go back to being a Buzzard again. I would have had to kill them and Judge Ito wouldn't have been pleased. But nobody would talk to me anymore. Not the berets who used to plead with me to sit in on their album sessions. Not the goonies in Venice who were always starting new bands. Not even the girls who had been begging me to brand them. It's a big city here, not like Indianapolis, but it sure is a small town. Don't know what the Buzzards said about me, but it wasn't very nice.
It was like being back in the desert again, this time with no Jim and no Indian, just sand that kept spilling through my fingers when I tried to hold onto it. I couldn't see the walls, but I could smell the anchovy breath of the turtles carrying the walls in on their shells. I was fucked up then, man, but not like now. I may be shit for brains, but when I smelled that turtle breath, I knew enough to get the hell out of there. I met up with a Camel playing sax and we trotted away. Maybe I was stupid for thinking I could out run turtles. They may be slow, but man, they don't sleep.
The camel and I were gonna head for Mecca, or Seattle you call it, but I fell off in San Francisco. At least I slept well in the Science Fiction fog. Nothing else to do. I just lay there on the pavement where I fell.
That's when Flash and Pig nearly run me over in their Vdub van painted like a cow. Pig did the painting. Flash played the drums. I was drunk and stupid and trusted them. What the hell, I figured. Can't see nothing in the fog anyway, can't even hear the heavy clump of approaching turtles, can't smell their breath more than five inches away, and by then its too late. So I figure, what the hell.
We decided to drive the cow up to Mecca. I figured I'd find my camel up there and we'd all start a new band. Something different. Not the muck that plays on the radio now but something that speaks to people, saying "open your hearts and let's make this a better place." Obviously their idea. I just played guitar. The camel played the saxophone. And a hitchhiker named Patty who we picked up in Peoughwanena became our lead singer. She wanted us to call her Peppermint Patty, but we named her Hamburger Patty. Every meal, we stopped at a MickeyD's where she ate hamburger. Just hamburger. Ordered a Big Mac, scraped off the special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and even the sesame seed bun and ate the beef patties with crackers. Swallowed it down with a glass of red wine. Kind of a vegan in reverse. Said that Brahma was reincarnated as a cow, so we should eat the cow's flesh just as we eat the flesh and blood of Jesus. Strange girl. But beautiful in a fucked-up way. She was destined for Seattle.
The band fell together pretty good. Called ourselves Hamburger Patty with Cheese. Pretty stupid, huh? Obviously not my idea. I wanted to call us the Cow Chips and play Mississippi Blues, but Pig said the Blues give him hives and besides, Patty couldn't sing worth shit. So we all played what we wanted - I rocked out a fast B.B. riff, Flash banged out John Bonham drums, Pig strummed a Kenny Gradney bass line, and Patty just wailed. Never figured out what the hell she was singing. Not that it mattered.
At first, we played a bunch of art gigs and coffee houses. It took a long time, but things slowly came together - we got a record contract which was nothing big, but it got us meal deals and even a bit of radio time. The camel was getting humped every night and Patty and I started to melt together. She wasn't like the others. You would have liked her, man. She was kinda weird with the whole philosophy thing, but she had a brain, even if it was a bit pan-fried. She used to explain things to me, like why you lawyers are always stealing everyone's money. She explained how it isn't really your fault. I mean, I don't remember why, but she made me respect you a little bit more, man. Can you understand? I didn't think you could, but she says you can. You would have liked her, I think. Maybe not. You always did make fun of all my friends for being stupid like me.
For the first time in my life, things were going well. I could see ole Elvis then, grinning like a dead cat and it's because he ain't got nothing to say. We were playing every night somewhere but gigs don't pay, man. I'll bet you didn't know that. In fact, in the mosh houses we gotta pay to play. Sounds like Lotto without the jackpot, which sounds pretty stupid. I guess we were pretty stupid, but that's how it's done. We pay, we play, they get the money. Nirvana hit the jackpot big time, so everyone figures this is the hot machine, just one more quarter and we'll break the bank. Nobody realizes the machine's just fucking empty. So we gotta scrape for money all day, too. Patty was a high priestess at Burger Thing. I hauled boxes in a Trans-Continental warehouse. The other assholes had Mama's money, so they beat off on their guitars all day then fuckin laid into me when I showed up three minutes late for rehearsal. Turds.
All day I carried boxes of other people's lives - computers, china, stereos, televisions, furniture, books, bicycles. Fuckin exhausting. The books were the worst cause everyone just sticks them in any old box laying around. They always broke all over the place and I'd have to pack them up again myself. They'll probably close my coffin up with duct tape.
You could always tell who owned those boxes. The hippies on the other side of the bay got boxes they scavenged from the dumpster behind 7-Eleven and they threw everything in there, no labels. The dweebs over in Bellevue still got the original styrofoam for every computer disk drive they ever bought, everything labeled down to the number of pencil erasers in the box. And all the people from la-la-land moving up here, they ain't got no books, just boxes and boxes of video tapes.
I hauled those boxes every day, man. From 7 am to 4 pm. Maybe God rested on Sunday, but he don't have to pay rent neither. For all that I got fifty-five slices a day. It's nasty out on the dock all day. It's hot in the summer and usually raining. They got big fans but they don't turn them on cause that would use electricity. The foreman hangs around in the air conditioned office, but we're stuck out there sweating in the heat. The big guys don't work hard cause the foreman's too chicken-shit to fire them, so us smaller guys gotta work double hard. And there's a couple of guys out there that are just plain psycho. Just as soon knife you as lift a box. That's when I started packing iron. A few rounds of live ammo in the parking lot and they think you're as psycho as them.
Finally, at 4 pm each day I stick my card in the alligator's mouth and I'm off to rehearsal and then the show. I don't get home most nights until 3 am and by the time I'd have Patty's clothes off, the boss box would be wailing like a junkie on rat poison.
Two months of this and I was exhausted. Fuckin completely out of energy. We'd be in a show and my arms would be aching bad from hauling those boxes all day. My fingers stung from a thousand paper cuts. The guitar strings would rip the calluses off every night, and by the end of the gig, my fingers would be bleeding all over the Strat. I couldn't hit half the chords. The slugs would be giving me nasty stares and Patty would slag them back, but I couldn't fuckin play worth shit. During breaks I would go through half a pack, which helped me stay awake but made my fingers shake like those old guys in the room with grandpa that we used to make fun of. So I guzzled Danny-boy to keep myself solid.
One night I'm in this club. Typical slab, a lot like Benders down on Meridian that I used to drag you to. Five thousand watt system, a dance floor the size of a kitchen table, and a stage so small we gotta put the amps on the floor. I don't even remember where this place was. But I remember the toilet. It had wooden swinging doors with the white paint flaked off. Inside were lots of tattered Bud Light posters with the Seahawks and the 1993 game schedule. There's a stainless steel trough-like thing to piss into and I've already had four beers, so I'm pissing away and next to me this huge, fat, bald guy in a Harley vest is pissing away, too. Then he starts looking at me and I think he must be a faggot or something, but then he starts talking about our band. Says he's seen us before and he really got into my Clapton riffs, but now I'm looking pretty ratty. I ain't got that special energy I had the last time I played there. I was figuring I had to punch him but then he says he understands cause he hauls a semi over the mountain all day. So I tell him about the mountain that I move every day and he looks real concerned. Pulls a Sucrets box out of his vest pocket and tells me this is what the big boys do when they get wiped. Swallows two of those little blue bullets and offers the box to me. I don't touch that shit, I tell him, so he takes out a bullet and puts one in my hand and leaves.
I was gonna toss it, but I didn't even have the energy to find the trashcan, so I just stuck it in my pocket. Then I flopped down at our table to enjoy the break. Next thing I know, the slugs are whacking me on the head with the plastic menu holders. Whack, whack, whack. Wake up, man, break's over, they said. Whack. The house music's off and everyone's staring at me. Whack. Patty's saying we ought to cancel, and the camel's already scoping the room for a woman with big lighters. Patty pulls me out of the chair and drags me into the bathroom to throw water on my face. All those drunk bikers pissing into the trough figure we're up to something nasty and they want their turn, too. But the water ain't doing nothing but dripping down my nose like from those icicle rocks in the caves we visited in Virginia. Patty's shaking me, saying, you okay, Josh? The water is dripping down my nose and all I can think about is the time you pushed me and my head smashed into that icicle thing and while I'm lying on the ground bleeding you're telling Mom I slipped on some wet patch that you're pointing at. Bet you forgot all about that, bro.
Anyway, that's when I bit the blue bullet. What the hell. Had to try something. There was a show to do and zombies can't play no Blues.
Man, those things are quick. Maybe that's why they're called bullets. Just a little blue Tylenol shaped thing that looks like what they gave me when I had pneumonia, but this is pure bottled energy. Ten seconds after you swallow it and it's like a bullet hit you in the chest. But instead of sucking away your energy like a real bullet, this one sucks in all the energy from the entire room - pulls it straight out of the biker's piss and the flushing toilets and the flickering light and directly into your veins. It's truly amazing, man.
By the time I left the bathroom, I was alive again, my body became the rhythm of the music, my brain racing forward to the next beat. I growled from the core of my lungs, jumped onto the stage, and began wailing. Man, everyone was into it. For the first time in my life, I did B.B. right. Flash could barely keep up with the licks I was laying down. Patty was improvising a whole new language, and the crowd was going crazy. It was completely insane. I never wanted to stop. We kept playing the whole night and nobody went home until the cops shut the place down at 4 am.
As soon as we got back to my place, I ripped off Patty's clothes and we had the most wild, religious sex of my life. I was totally freaked and Patty loved every minute of it. I was all over her. I never knew it could be that good. Afterwards, as we lay on the damp carpet that reeked of our sweat, a hundred years of spilled beers and the mist that floated in through the windows, I kind of remember proposing to her, but I think I passed out before she answered.
I spent the next morning in a small, quiet room in hell. Patty slid off into the morning hash browns while I slept until the renwa called and chased me into the warehouse. The big man wasn't happy. He sat there in his leather chair in the air-conditioned office, puffing away on a Marlboro. In between blowing smoke in my face, he was asking me, are you a loser, boy? I don't want no losers working here. Sounded just like Dad when he came back from the poker game having lost our vacation money and saw my report card. So I did what I always did with Dad, I sat there all scrunched up and promised to be better, promised to be his slave if he would only allow me to move those boxes all day. The bald-butt boss finally fumbled me back onto the dock, where I guzzled caffeine until the ticks stopped clocking and it was back to the club.
That night, the same fat trucker was in the bar, so we head into the bathroom and I tanked up right away. But I was getting smarter - I saved an extra bullet for the morning so that when the boss box buzzed, I swallowed and leapt into the car and blew past traffic at 117. No better way to fly.
So I guess you know where this is going. The band was quite fantastic, that is really what I think, oh by the way, which one's my blue bullet? The more I swallowed, the better we got. The better we got, the more we had to play. The crowds kept growing larger and wilder. The miniskirts would be jumping up on stage and dancing with us, and even the suits in the back would be smiling and tapping their hands on the table.
But the mornings kept getting rougher. The only thing that could jump start me was my blue bullet. Some mornings I'd lay in bed and stare at the little blue capsule and try to figure out the numbers printed on it. I'd lick the side and it tasted like when you put your tongue on the tip of a battery. I'd scrape a bit off with my fingernail and it tasted like chalk. And I'd wonder what I'd do without it.
Fortunately, supply was never a problem - there's a mountain of trucks moving up the mountains so there's an armory of bullets to shoot them over. But the more I needed the bullets to survive the boxes, the more I needed the boxes to pay for the bullets. Yeah, I'm not as stupid as you think. I knew what was happening. But the band was working, so I was king of that mountain of boxes.
Patty tried to get me to quit. Told me Brahma didn't think it was pure. The other guys didn't give a shit. They could keep shitting in peace so long as the bullets kept me burning the guitar. But I was a mess and I knew it. Finally one night, I was beggin this sleazebag in a BMW to give me a break, just this once, I'd always been good for it before. But I knew I wouldn't pay him next time cause I wouldn't have nothing to pay him with then neither. Then he'd have to cut off my toes and I knew I was becoming one of those slogs you defend who don't know if it's worse to go to jail or be out and have their toes chopped off. And you know, bro, I didn't care if they chopped off my legs so long as I didn't become one of your cases.
So I said fuck you to Mr. BMW and he sneered at me nasty, squealed his tires and drove off. I'm going to quit this shit, I decided, and that's when the shit started flowing over the dam.
I was a mess. I was sweating out bullets. I spent half the time destroying everything in my asylum and the other half lying on the tile in the bathroom when I could make it that far. Patty was screaming about something and the band slugs were kicking bootprints into the walls. I told them to fuck off. I told her to fuck off. When silence finally came and enveloped me in fog, I melted into the carpet. Then something strange happened. I started floating around, into the lamp, then into the television, into the stereo for a long time, and finally up into a crack in the ceiling. I looked down and saw my body lying on the floor, sweating, screaming, and smeared with blood from the holes I punctured in myself with the furniture.
I stared at my body and I thought about it real objective like and said "what is he?" He ain't no brain surgeon, though he might need one now. He sure wasn't born to be no lawyer like you. We both knew that from the start. But he wasn't a gambler like Dad. He was a guitar player. That's all he could do. All he wanted to do. Maybe that's what Patty was trying to tell me about you. Did you ever look at yourself and think maybe you didn't want to be a rich, hot-shot lawyer? Maybe you wanted to be something else - James Bond, Einstein, Michael Jordan, Mother Teresa, or a guitar player who doesn't know shit about nothing so never has to worry about the mortgage, the kid's piano lessons, the PTA meetings. Are you the way you are because that's all you could be?
Well, I knew then what I was - a guitar player, and I knew what I wasn't. Standing on the turtle's shell, I heard Jim whisper, "Just do it, man. Do whatever it takes," and he was right. So I said fuck it, fuck everything. I'm here to play. And I bit the bullet again.
I made it to the club, but there was no band. Manager kicked me in the shins and threw me out. I tracked down the slugs but they wouldn't talk to me. Gonna find a new guitar player, they said. Someone who could handle it. Easy for them now that I made them famous. They stole my fuckin amp too saying it belonged to the band. Patty just stared at me, crying. I finally told her to get in the car. She just sobbed. Said she was leaving for India.
So I slapped her face, trying to knock some sense into her. It always seemed to work for Dad on you, although I guess it never did on me. That's when the slugs started beating up on me. So I said fuck them all and got the fuck out of there and now I'm here, in the car, lost.
I can hear you thinking, man. You're saying, Josh, you're a fucked up son of a bitch, just like you always say. Then you say, you gotta get yourself straightened out. But it just ain't that easy, Rich. It just ain't.
So where am I now, you wonder. Do you? I sure do. I don't know where I'll be when you hear this tape. I barely know where I am now. I'm sitting in my bomber somewhere staring at cinder block walls. The turtles are waiting for me. I haven't slept in three days. There's nothing left to sleep for. No band. No woman. No friends. No family. No money. No food. No amp. The only things left are me and my car and my guitar.
And one more blue bullet.
And a gun. And that blue bullet.
And a bullet.
And my guitar.
And my car.
And me.
So many choices. I never did like choices.
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