Satan Burger (2 page)

Sometimes I believe that I’m
blessed
with my God’s Eyes, just like the people on TV that say they are blessed with psychic powers.  God’s sympathy is why I can see this way, even though I have never been a BIG fan of God’s.  Someday I’ll figure out why He gave them to me.

Maybe I am His son, like Jesus Christ, but regarded as the fuck-up of his two children.  Who knows . . .

Occasionally I enjoy my rolling world.  It can put me into a peaceful hum that relaxes every twitchy nerve in my body.  Sure, it’s hard to get around when you can’t see straight, but sometimes it is pacific-beauty.

Once I asked a doctor, "What is wrong with me?"

I figured he wouldn’t believe me.  Even
I
don’t believe me.  Who has ever heard of acid ocean eyes?

But the doctor was just staring at his wall, paying no compassion.

Then he shrugged.

He said, "There is always something wrong with someone."

Scene 2

The Warehouse Between

The Warehouse Between DimensionsThe Warehouse Between DimensionsThe Warehouse Between Dimensions

I live in a warehouse with three friends and two strangers.

My highest of the three friends is named Christian.  He has a speaking problem caused by drug abuse as well – maybe that’s why we became friends – but it is quite the opposite of mine.  His problem is that he never shuts up, like he’s naturally cranked up on snoopies, the dippy-fun guy.  He talks and talks and talks, even when there’s nothing to talk about, even when he’s alone.  Over and over, the same subjects, annoying mostly everyone he comes into contact with.  Most of the time all his talking gets on my nerves as well, but I’m sure that all my silence is a pester to him.

But it isn’t like that all the time.  When I’m alone with him, we communicate differently than with a crowd.  I speak more and he speaks less, so that it all evens out to a medium speed somehow.  Besides the small people in my wall, he is the only person that I enjoy talking to.

Nobody knows that Christian and I speak differently when we are alone.  They say that Leaf is as silent as a leaf, and Christian is as obnoxious as a Christian.

I don’t remember Christians being obnoxious, but my friends tell me they all were at one point. So they say.  There are no more Christians today, at least not the Christ-worshipping kind, and there aren’t any religions either.

The religions were the first things that everyone became bored with.  People stopped praying and going to church, holy water went unblessed, crosses and candles were no longer being purchased.  The whole religious phenomenon just vanished, like
snap
, besides the few who considered their religion’s ways of living too routine to stop.

Routine
is an important word today, because it is the only thing left that makes the world go around.

The people of Rippington are excluded from this statement, since the walm is the opposite of routine.  And the walm brings out odd feelings in the beings that surround it.  These feelings are the natural reaction to the foreign energy that fuels the walm, the stuff that makes it go.  We call the energy
sillygo
, but that’s not the scientific term.  The name the scientists gave it was
the stuff that makes it go
, because the scientists didn’t care much to give it a proper scientific name. 

We call it sillygo because it makes you go silly.  Nobody knows any more about it than that.  Probably because everyone in Rippington went silly, and I’m sure everyone outside of Rippington could care less.

As for the people that come out of the walm, they could give a pig’s twat about the native Rippingtonians. They are Earth’s
new
toys, and the only things Child Earth pays attention to these days are the new toys.  No longer does he enjoy watching the lives of us outdated action figures as he did with my ancestors.  New toys are now higher classed citizens as far as Earth is concerned, even if the old toys have more money and better living arrangements. 

The new people live on the streets in small settlements.  Two settlements are nearby the warehouse where I live. One is a medieval tent village by the train tracks.  The other is a colony of midgets that dress up like past U.S. presidents.  (The word
midget
, by the way, is no longer an offensive term since no one is offended by anything anymore.) 

I think I’ve seen an Ulysses S. Grant midget once, but I’m not for sure.  Grant was the closest president that popped into my head at that time, so I guessed it was him.  How many were fat and bearded anyway?  Most of the midgets are not very good at impersonating.  Maybe they like it that way.

I am sitting in the warehouse with my cello right now.

It’s not a very healthy cello.  I found it in an abandoned apartment house all crippled and warped.  But I’m not a very good cello player, so it all evens out.  I like to make scratch-crazy noises on it, defacing it with the bow.  I’m very good at this.  Getting more and more obnoxious every day. And I am very proud of myself.

The cello is also the soundtrack to my rolling world vision.  Right now, I’m scratching at the strings, creating a sound similar to a saw cutting wood, ogling at a group of steel sculptures, very sharp-spiked and crude, and they roll around like lardy belly dancers.

The warehouse was once used for producing hundreds of steel sculptures by a female artist known as
The Lady of Steel
.  The works are awe-interesting in my roll-woggy eyes, but none of my roommates appreciate them, spitting candy-phlegm on the ground sometimes.  The outside world has probably lost
all
interest in art by now.  Not even the citizens of Rippington care for it.  Not even my friends.

After The Lady of Steel lost all her money, she gave us her warehouse and all of her sculptures.  She said she was going to go through the walm to find a less boring place to live in, one with an appreciation for fine art.  She was the only person I can think of who wanted to go through that horrible walm door, into another dimension-world.

I look down at my forearm:

The arm hairs are fanning without wind, crawling like creeper-weeds, wire-spiders, pulsating soup skin.

I look to the window: a malformed wave of water, coming to crash over me, the drool of a senile planet.  My stomach turns with the wave.  My breath vibrating.  I can no longer keep up with the rolling world, so my eyes close drunk.

Whenever my visions get me dizzy from an overdose of movement, I either shut myself off from the outside world or look through my God’s Eyes.  I’ve chosen the latter.

God’s Eyes:

I go to my best friend, Mr. Christian, looking down at him through the cloud’s chin-hair, as he walks up the train track carrying a steel drum.  Christian is wearing a polyester suit; he
always
wears a polyester suit.  We call him a wannabe rude boy, smoking on his cheap cigars.  There aren’t any more rude boys. There aren’t any more wannabe rude boys either.  The term I am speaking of is a Jamaican slang word for
gangster
.

In the sixties, Jamaicans would pretend to be rude boys.  They would dress up classy in zoot suits, porkpie hats, cold eyebrows, smooth words.  They were influenced by ska music, which often glorified the lifestyles of rude boys and made everyone want to be one.  Years later, the same thing happened with rap music.  Glorifying gangsters (sometimes spelled/pronounced
gangstas
) in music usually creates wannabes.

Christian does not consider himself a rude boy, and he doesn’t care for the jazz-like music that rude boys listened to. He considers himself
punk
and wears his suits just to be unusual.

In other words: UNUSUAL = PUNK.

Two medieval knights are sword-fighting in Christian’s path, going
clink-clink
and
arr-arr!
  He doesn’t mind to them, passing by with hardly a flinch when their swords collide.  We are accustomed to walking through battles in our front rail yard.  It is so common that we don’t care enough to use our dodging skills anymore – too lazy.  Charging right through is the quickest way.

Nobody is afraid of dying these days either.

"Death isn’t as bad as everyone thinks," Christian always says.  "It’s just one step away from being alive again."

He’s believed in reincarnation ever since he was a child.  He swears that his little sister was reincarnated into his pet ferret five years after her death.  Then his pet ferret was reincarnated into a wolf spider, and then an autocar, and then a rock.  It’s always an animal or object, never another person that can say
hi, I’m a reincarnation of his sister
, so he’s hard to argue against.  Nobody believes him, but he’ll punch your face off your head if you tell him he’s wrong.

Somebody said that Christian was responsible for his sister’s death, leaving her all alone in the kitchen when he was supposed to be watching her.  But it was probably his parents’ fault or, more likely, God’s fault.

When Christian arrives at the warehouse and trips over my corpse, only half a thumb of a cigar left, he yells out my name and I awake inside of my rolling world.

His face melts out twitchy-fast words: "Figured your punk ass’d be here, always locked away, never doing anything anymore, you look like a pile of dick."

He’s right about one thing.  I’m always indoors.  Everyone calls me agoraphobic, but you’d be too if you had eyes like mine.  I pause, continuing with the wood-sawing sounds, staring at the sculpture-dancers.

I respond, "You’d be too if you had eyes like mine."  It’s my usual response.

Christian goes to the toilet in the center of the room.  We use this toilet for crapping and as a television stand since it is situated in the middle of a room instead of a bathroom.  He has to take the television off the seat before he tinkers into the tinker pot.

"You’re always bummed about that shit, guy," he spurts.  "Get on with your life.  If I could trip all day without needing any drugs, I’d be cumming in my pants."

He always says that.

And I always say this:

"You get stressed of it quick." I scratch my shirt that says
Brain Disease
. 

"Yeah, yeah, always complaining." Christian grumbles the toilet water down. "Complaining, complaining, whining, complaining."

"What’s wrong with you?" I say in a shaky, tiny-girl voice. 

"The usual," he responds, placing the television back on the toilet seat.  "Overwhelmed with boredom."

He turns the channels on the TV, most of which seem to be cooking shows and game shows.

"I think Battlestar Galactica’s going to be on soon," I say grubulous.

Christian complies with a squint and corrects the channel, pulling up a milk crate.  I hate sitting on milk crates, but they’re our only chairs. 

I continue, "If I had to choose only one show to watch forever . . . it’d be Battlestar Galactica."

I go into my God’s Eyes and wander the room, move around to the back of the television set and watch us as we watch television. 

Behind Christian and my corpse, I see a bald, fat, middle-aged man staring at us through the window, puckering his lips, making perverted expressions.

"I thought you only liked the theme song, guy," Christian says.  "Nobody seriously likes that stupid show."

I am actually offended by this, but nobody shows offense anymore so I don’t make a BIG deal out of it. 

"No, I
seriously
like it."  The words leave my brain and come out of my corpse in the distance, almost like ventriloquism.  "The theme song is good, but I like everything about it.  You’re thinking of Hawaii Five-O.  That’s the one that has a super Mr. T song, but nobody likes the show."

The fat man begins licking the glass in our direction with a fat spongy tongue.  He is John, one of the two strangers that live in the back of the warehouse who have no connection to the inside of our home, who we do not speak to, who we collect rent from and don’t like.  One of his hands is sweating a palmprint into the window, but I think he has the other one inside his pants.  I don’t feel disturbed by him, even though he is jerking off to my own picture.  I pretend not to notice.

But I begin to wonder how many perverted old men have masturbated to my picture in the past.  It is quite possible that this performance took place very many times.  Before I had God’s Eyes, it could have happened all the time.  Like there are perverted old men everywhere, behind tinted glass, in public bathrooms, on balconies or behind holes drilled into walls, watching, masturbating, fantasizing about you. I wonder if anyone else ever thinks about this.

"I like the Greatest American Hero song the best," says Christian.  He hasn’t seen the perverted man.

"That’s a groobly one too.  We should cover that song at the show tonight."

"That’d be killer, guy.  I’ll work on it."

Battlestar Galactica really is my favorite show.  I worship it.  There’s something about science-fiction from the seventies that turns me dippy, something about the mixture of disco and futurism and sexy spandex space suits. 

A figure, too fast for my God’s Eyes, passes John from the outside, John still licking the glass, saliva running the dust-window scent up a nostril.  The figure enters. 

It is Mort, another roommate.  Christian’s best friend besides myself.  He’s Japanese but never speaks his birth language.  But he still carries the accent with him.

I enter my natural eyes and we turn to his attention.

Christian’s greetings: "Mortician, where have you been all day?  I thought we were supposed to be playing a show here tonight."

"I was getting a new distortion pedal," Mort replies.  "The one we have’s bust, and I looked all over town for one. Eventually, I got one from Lenny."

"How good is it?"

"Not great, but it’ll do, me matey."

Mort says
me matey
because he is obsessed with pirates, or the old-fashioned stereotype of pirates.  He always dresses up pirate-like with a skull hat and eye-patch.  And he speaks with a mock-pirate accent, which doesn’t work very well since his Japanese accent is so strong.  The combination of Japanese and Pirate form a new accent of Mort’s own.  It’s difficult to understand him at times, but Christian seems to catch his words clearly.

Mort turns to me: 

"Arr, did you tell him, Leaf?" he asks me, motioning to Christian.  A tremor shoots through my body.  I heard him ask me the question, but I can’t come up with an answer.

"What?" I respond, unsteady.

"Did you tell him the news?"

I shrug.

"Tell me what?" Christian saves me from speaking.

"We rented out the other room."

"Really?  T’who?" Christian asks.

"To Satan," Mort answers.

Christian pauses, his eyes bobbing.  "There’s a guy nicknamed
Satan
?"

"No, that’s his real name."

"Someone named their kid
Satan
?"

"No, it
is
Satan. 
The
Satan.  You know, the devil.  And you’re not going to believe this, but he’s a fairy."