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May. 21st, 2010 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonAfter parties are the best parties really.
They’re where the decisive and desperate overtime rounds in the game of getting laid are played out, granting a miraculous second chance when luck was anything but a lady back at the club. When last call comes a few drinks too soon and you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here, there is for the scene cognoscenti, the brief sanctuary of the after party.
And Mannn, no one threw an after party like Skinhead Ronnie!
Everyone, and I mean, everyone knew it was the place to be. That band you couldn’t afford tickets to see… there. The dealer who wouldn’t return your texts all night… there. Remember the elusive stranger you were hoping to meet, you saw hir for a second before they were swallowed by the crowd… yeah, there. The promoters, the fetish models, the burlesque vets, the rave DJs, the roller derby commandos… oh, you know it.
All that was missing really was you.
However there comes a point when the last beer spills across the carpet. Look around, you realize that the last laugh just took off with a bad joke no one can bother to remember. The mirror has been licked clean. The firework thoughts have sizzled into mindless gibberish. TV eyes bolted open and glazed, fluorescent complexions of ghoul green and shallow as shadows cast against the wall behind them. Phantom eddies of raw of paranoia swirling unseen through the dwindling crowd.
Joan , Ronnie’s woman of twelve years running now, was blessed with the rare gift of timing that located the exact tipping point in a party when enough was about to become enough. She plucked her man’s eye from out of the gloom with a single arched brow. Having properly secured his attention, she chose from a lexicon of ‘looks’ one that clearly conveyed her intent to go to bed immediately and if Ronnie knew what was good for him he wouldn’t be far behind.
Skinhead Ronnie gives the slightest of nods to Joan. He wears the impassive gaze of an emperor, that when combined with his feral goatee, lend him the appearance of a hillbilly Ming the Merciless. Towering over the rest of the guests at an agro-charged 5’6”, Ronnie’s is a commanding presence, magnetic and capable of silencing the rowdiest of crowds with a single word. Beer bellied and arms covered in sleeves of ink commemorating private wars long past, he wears the aura of a marauder chieftain, a dwarf Viking and a coke-savage Hell’s Angel rolled into one volatile soul. No one looks down when they speak to Ronnie and it is only Joan, (statuesque Joan, his red headed and freckled valkyrie) more than dares to meet his stare at even level.
Ronnie summons the room’s attention from the television abyss with a click of the remote off and a series of clapping hands. Startled fish faces turn as one on the man. Satisfied, he issues the verdict: Shows over – everyone out!
One by one they left – Dumpster Dan, Mohawk Mike, Big Mark and all those other mother-fuckers with their Mad Libs/Tourettes Syndrome sounding names. Goodbyes muttered and coughed and grunted. Hands slapped, shook and turned to fists from where a friendly middle finger launched in irreverent farewell. One by one they drifted out the screen door, scurrying out of the two bedroom house Ronnie and Joan rented in the heart of Engineville. Some piled into hotwired cars, some mounted scooters with engines that belched smoke and some took off on foot across stone silent streets.
Ronnie shut, locked, bolted and chained the door behind them. From there he proceeded to strip down to his drawers, while a bemused Joan watched from the doorway of their bedroom. He pogo hopped on one foot trying without luck to peel an impressively sized boot from the other. He gave up eventually and decided that the boots would be, in his admittedly tenuous grasp of the concept, romantic. Ready to pounce amorously into his lady’s affections he was stopped cold, when Joan wagged a single finger ‘no’ truncating his advance without warning. Ronnie sighed exasperated and in return she drew his attention, with a nod of her chin, towards the tattered and patched remains of the old couch that came with the place.
There, curled into a human question mark with back to all, was one last asshole Ronnie must’ve missed while cleaning house of any stray guests and last minute stragglers.
Could’ve been the angle or the bad mood but Ronnie didn’t recognize his ‘guest’. Some goth goof judging by the Hot Topic catastrophe of an ensemble, one fit for either a morbid rave or a casual Friday funeral. Oily long hair draped over scarecrow wide shoulders. Face buried in the crack between the cushion and the back. Pipe thin arms folded to cradle head, revealing a shingles rash. Mainly it was the mud splattered
Frankenstein shoes fucking up the cushions that stomped Ronnie’s attention beneath their indifference.
Ronnie flips an invisible coin mentally. Heads – kick his ass now. Tails – kick him out and then kick his ass next time he saw him. On the one hand is the need to address this blatant violation of the social contract – after all a man just doesn’t come into another man’s home uninvited and start fucking up his shit. On the other hand is a waiting Joan, which is the hand in which he catches that coin.
Tails it is.
“Alright, Mother Fucker…” Ronnie uses his ‘bouncer’ voice, a bark loaded with paternal exasperation and indifferent authority, “… you can’t be staying here. Not with them stupid ass shoes fucking up my couch. Getcher ass up and out of here.”
Nothing from the guest. Not a stir in reaction, not a groan in response.
“Hey! Don’t make me come over there and drag your ass out…” Ronnie’s bark amplifies into a hoarse shout. When the guest remains motionless, a dull dread washes over him. He sighs out his puffed chest, slackens for a moment and wearily makes his way over to the couch.
“I’ll tell you this shit for free, your ass better not have O.D.’ed. ‘cause I swear I’ll just bury yer ass out back if you did.” Ronnie lays a cool, heavy hand across the guest’s shoulder and spins him around.
The eyes of the face register first. This is because they bulge at Ronnie without eyelids, which have been burned away to leave oval rings of blood speckled pus oozing black scars around the raw sockets.
“Fuck!” Ronnie blurts and leaps back almost tripping over the beer can littered coffee table.
“What?” Joan asks startled making her way over.
“Joan, no!” Ronnie snaps quickly composing himself. “Stay there, Baby. You don’t want to see this…”
The guest releases a low gurgling noise.
Ronnie turns around.
The eyeballs start flicking around the room with sudden awareness before settling on Ronnie. With a stomach churning noise between slurping and gasp, two sets of tiny, pudgy milk white squirm around the orbits from within the skull. They then push the eyes out. Two sets of miniature flabby arms, wrapped in an impossible mesh of nerve endings, extend free from the sockets baring in their diminutive hands still active eyeballs.
Ronnie can’t move. Horror entranced and thought gears jammed on the spectacle.
The Guest begins choking, looking as if he is going to start heaving, his cheeks puffed out and with a choking yawn he leans over the couch and vomits out a phlegm stream of blood and teeth.
When the Guest looks back up at Ronnie and screams.
Only instead of a noise the lips part as an upside down baby’s face pushes itself forward. The face within the face starts to chew the silence around them and then releases a howl between newborn wail and the chorus of a hundred dying frogs. The guest then stands, no not stands, is yanked up off the couch by a pair of invisible fingers.
Ronnie snaps out of the shock funk shouting without turning from the whatever the hell it is: “Baby, run!”
“What is it?” Joan doesn’t sound terrified, merely confused. She’s seeing what Ronnie’s seeing but on some intuitive level her brain is refusing to process the full implications of the information it’s receiving.
“Don’t know…” he starts inching his way back, “.. but we ain’t stickin’ round to find out!”
The guest stands there for a moment, making bird like jerks of its head, the arms waving the eyeballs frantically around the room while the upside down pudgy baby face (with its own eyes tightly closed) squirms within the frozen open mouth.
He, well it really, moves towards Ronnie as if it had only just recently learned how to walk, staggering wildly and knocking the table over in its advance. Empty bottle and can cascade. Joan is already at the front door, frantically unlocking and unbolting her way to freedom. She turns to Ronnie – “Your gun!”
“Under the couch!” Ronnie shouts back, the inching becoming a series of long backward strides towards her side.
“Fuck!” Joan hisses and, despite hours of horror movie scenes to the contrary, escapes through the door with ease.
The Guest moves forward, crunching the spilt cans and smashing the bottles indifferent to notice. Joan pops the door open. Ronnie scoops down and picks up the puddle of his pants. The face within a face hisses and begins staggering quickly towards Ronnie with two sets of outstretched arms. Ronnie instinctively flings the clothes at the face within a face, blinding it momentarily as he bolts for the door.
The guest is right behind him when Ronnie spins quick, delivers a quick jab to the nose of the outer face. The guest goes reeling back, more startled than harmed and its tracks steps on the cable remote that was recently unburied from the layers of trash it hibernated under when the coffee table went over.
The small Panasonic TV flares into life. An infomercial blares out with artificial enthusiasm and friendly desperation. The miniature baby arms swing the eyeballs around to train on the screen and slowly, the rest of the body turns around to join them.
It then proceeds to just stand there, releasing the occasional baffled croak or curious whimper.
Ronnie’s not sure what’s up here but he knows this is his opportunity. Out the door, without pause, even as he snags keys, wallet and cell phone off the little end table in the doorway. He slams the door behind him, locks everything he can and turns to Joan.
Without word they face and embrace into a tight hug, each squeezing from the other a desperate reassurance that they were still there. Still real. Their bond a solid tether to the reality of their lives before this sudden outbreak of madness.
Joan finally pulls back and asks the much needed: “Now what?”
Ronnie doesn’t answer. Instead he walks around to the side of the house. Joan follows. Coming to a window Ronnie stands on his tippy toes to peer over the ledge. Joan comes up and stares in behind him. The Guest is still standing there boob tube transfixed.
“Now I make a call.” Ronnie’s answer comes time delayed, only at the familiar glow of his flipped open phone.
“The police?”
“With two pounds of weed and an eight ball in the bedroom. I don’t think so.”
“Somehow I think they’ll have other things on their mind.”
“Nah, baby…” Ronnie gazes off into the possibilities and gives a small shudder, “… sooner or later they’d have questions we wouldn’t wanna be answering. A lot of them and that’s a bunch of bullshit we don’t be needing right now.”
“So who you calling, a friend?”
“Nah, definitely not.” Ronnie snorts at the thought before reluctantly scrolling through the contacts on his phone. When he comes to the number marked ‘ASSHOLE’ he hits call.
The phone rings an inordinately long time before being answered. A muffled ‘hello’ from the other end is preemptively truncated by Ronnie – “Hey! I need you to get yer ass over to my place A.S.A. fuckin’ P! We have a problem!”
Follow those words across the call's flight. Launched up from Engineville in a bark to soar over the Little Star shopping district, up over the silhouetted skyline etched against the first waves of dusk. Vanish amongst the morning stars blinking faintly. Then trajectory found, they dive down into the city, pulling up to navigate the labyrinth of narrow side streets, main avenues and secret alleyways until finally descending through the ceiling of an abandoned hotel. Destination: The Gallows Town Inn. Inside we discover the boarded windows and padded doors of the inn contradicted by the presence of an occupied room. One inhabited solely by a shadow sitting cross-legged within the center of a day glow blue and spray paint red circle. Within the luminescent ring sigils burn bright as stars across the molded gray carpet. The shadow shoulders the phone while lighting up a cigarette.
“Talk to me, Ronnie.” The phosphorous white flash of a match reveals briefly the face of Adam Last. A puff of death sucked off a sick orange ember and with a snap of the wrist the room plunges back into darkness.
CAUGHT BETWEEN DEMONS & FLOWERS
They’re where the decisive and desperate overtime rounds in the game of getting laid are played out, granting a miraculous second chance when luck was anything but a lady back at the club. When last call comes a few drinks too soon and you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here, there is for the scene cognoscenti, the brief sanctuary of the after party.
And Mannn, no one threw an after party like Skinhead Ronnie!
Everyone, and I mean, everyone knew it was the place to be. That band you couldn’t afford tickets to see… there. The dealer who wouldn’t return your texts all night… there. Remember the elusive stranger you were hoping to meet, you saw hir for a second before they were swallowed by the crowd… yeah, there. The promoters, the fetish models, the burlesque vets, the rave DJs, the roller derby commandos… oh, you know it.
All that was missing really was you.
However there comes a point when the last beer spills across the carpet. Look around, you realize that the last laugh just took off with a bad joke no one can bother to remember. The mirror has been licked clean. The firework thoughts have sizzled into mindless gibberish. TV eyes bolted open and glazed, fluorescent complexions of ghoul green and shallow as shadows cast against the wall behind them. Phantom eddies of raw of paranoia swirling unseen through the dwindling crowd.
Joan , Ronnie’s woman of twelve years running now, was blessed with the rare gift of timing that located the exact tipping point in a party when enough was about to become enough. She plucked her man’s eye from out of the gloom with a single arched brow. Having properly secured his attention, she chose from a lexicon of ‘looks’ one that clearly conveyed her intent to go to bed immediately and if Ronnie knew what was good for him he wouldn’t be far behind.
Skinhead Ronnie gives the slightest of nods to Joan. He wears the impassive gaze of an emperor, that when combined with his feral goatee, lend him the appearance of a hillbilly Ming the Merciless. Towering over the rest of the guests at an agro-charged 5’6”, Ronnie’s is a commanding presence, magnetic and capable of silencing the rowdiest of crowds with a single word. Beer bellied and arms covered in sleeves of ink commemorating private wars long past, he wears the aura of a marauder chieftain, a dwarf Viking and a coke-savage Hell’s Angel rolled into one volatile soul. No one looks down when they speak to Ronnie and it is only Joan, (statuesque Joan, his red headed and freckled valkyrie) more than dares to meet his stare at even level.
Ronnie summons the room’s attention from the television abyss with a click of the remote off and a series of clapping hands. Startled fish faces turn as one on the man. Satisfied, he issues the verdict: Shows over – everyone out!
One by one they left – Dumpster Dan, Mohawk Mike, Big Mark and all those other mother-fuckers with their Mad Libs/Tourettes Syndrome sounding names. Goodbyes muttered and coughed and grunted. Hands slapped, shook and turned to fists from where a friendly middle finger launched in irreverent farewell. One by one they drifted out the screen door, scurrying out of the two bedroom house Ronnie and Joan rented in the heart of Engineville. Some piled into hotwired cars, some mounted scooters with engines that belched smoke and some took off on foot across stone silent streets.
Ronnie shut, locked, bolted and chained the door behind them. From there he proceeded to strip down to his drawers, while a bemused Joan watched from the doorway of their bedroom. He pogo hopped on one foot trying without luck to peel an impressively sized boot from the other. He gave up eventually and decided that the boots would be, in his admittedly tenuous grasp of the concept, romantic. Ready to pounce amorously into his lady’s affections he was stopped cold, when Joan wagged a single finger ‘no’ truncating his advance without warning. Ronnie sighed exasperated and in return she drew his attention, with a nod of her chin, towards the tattered and patched remains of the old couch that came with the place.
There, curled into a human question mark with back to all, was one last asshole Ronnie must’ve missed while cleaning house of any stray guests and last minute stragglers.
Could’ve been the angle or the bad mood but Ronnie didn’t recognize his ‘guest’. Some goth goof judging by the Hot Topic catastrophe of an ensemble, one fit for either a morbid rave or a casual Friday funeral. Oily long hair draped over scarecrow wide shoulders. Face buried in the crack between the cushion and the back. Pipe thin arms folded to cradle head, revealing a shingles rash. Mainly it was the mud splattered
Frankenstein shoes fucking up the cushions that stomped Ronnie’s attention beneath their indifference.
Ronnie flips an invisible coin mentally. Heads – kick his ass now. Tails – kick him out and then kick his ass next time he saw him. On the one hand is the need to address this blatant violation of the social contract – after all a man just doesn’t come into another man’s home uninvited and start fucking up his shit. On the other hand is a waiting Joan, which is the hand in which he catches that coin.
Tails it is.
“Alright, Mother Fucker…” Ronnie uses his ‘bouncer’ voice, a bark loaded with paternal exasperation and indifferent authority, “… you can’t be staying here. Not with them stupid ass shoes fucking up my couch. Getcher ass up and out of here.”
Nothing from the guest. Not a stir in reaction, not a groan in response.
“Hey! Don’t make me come over there and drag your ass out…” Ronnie’s bark amplifies into a hoarse shout. When the guest remains motionless, a dull dread washes over him. He sighs out his puffed chest, slackens for a moment and wearily makes his way over to the couch.
“I’ll tell you this shit for free, your ass better not have O.D.’ed. ‘cause I swear I’ll just bury yer ass out back if you did.” Ronnie lays a cool, heavy hand across the guest’s shoulder and spins him around.
The eyes of the face register first. This is because they bulge at Ronnie without eyelids, which have been burned away to leave oval rings of blood speckled pus oozing black scars around the raw sockets.
“Fuck!” Ronnie blurts and leaps back almost tripping over the beer can littered coffee table.
“What?” Joan asks startled making her way over.
“Joan, no!” Ronnie snaps quickly composing himself. “Stay there, Baby. You don’t want to see this…”
The guest releases a low gurgling noise.
Ronnie turns around.
The eyeballs start flicking around the room with sudden awareness before settling on Ronnie. With a stomach churning noise between slurping and gasp, two sets of tiny, pudgy milk white squirm around the orbits from within the skull. They then push the eyes out. Two sets of miniature flabby arms, wrapped in an impossible mesh of nerve endings, extend free from the sockets baring in their diminutive hands still active eyeballs.
Ronnie can’t move. Horror entranced and thought gears jammed on the spectacle.
The Guest begins choking, looking as if he is going to start heaving, his cheeks puffed out and with a choking yawn he leans over the couch and vomits out a phlegm stream of blood and teeth.
When the Guest looks back up at Ronnie and screams.
Only instead of a noise the lips part as an upside down baby’s face pushes itself forward. The face within the face starts to chew the silence around them and then releases a howl between newborn wail and the chorus of a hundred dying frogs. The guest then stands, no not stands, is yanked up off the couch by a pair of invisible fingers.
Ronnie snaps out of the shock funk shouting without turning from the whatever the hell it is: “Baby, run!”
“What is it?” Joan doesn’t sound terrified, merely confused. She’s seeing what Ronnie’s seeing but on some intuitive level her brain is refusing to process the full implications of the information it’s receiving.
“Don’t know…” he starts inching his way back, “.. but we ain’t stickin’ round to find out!”
The guest stands there for a moment, making bird like jerks of its head, the arms waving the eyeballs frantically around the room while the upside down pudgy baby face (with its own eyes tightly closed) squirms within the frozen open mouth.
He, well it really, moves towards Ronnie as if it had only just recently learned how to walk, staggering wildly and knocking the table over in its advance. Empty bottle and can cascade. Joan is already at the front door, frantically unlocking and unbolting her way to freedom. She turns to Ronnie – “Your gun!”
“Under the couch!” Ronnie shouts back, the inching becoming a series of long backward strides towards her side.
“Fuck!” Joan hisses and, despite hours of horror movie scenes to the contrary, escapes through the door with ease.
The Guest moves forward, crunching the spilt cans and smashing the bottles indifferent to notice. Joan pops the door open. Ronnie scoops down and picks up the puddle of his pants. The face within a face hisses and begins staggering quickly towards Ronnie with two sets of outstretched arms. Ronnie instinctively flings the clothes at the face within a face, blinding it momentarily as he bolts for the door.
The guest is right behind him when Ronnie spins quick, delivers a quick jab to the nose of the outer face. The guest goes reeling back, more startled than harmed and its tracks steps on the cable remote that was recently unburied from the layers of trash it hibernated under when the coffee table went over.
The small Panasonic TV flares into life. An infomercial blares out with artificial enthusiasm and friendly desperation. The miniature baby arms swing the eyeballs around to train on the screen and slowly, the rest of the body turns around to join them.
It then proceeds to just stand there, releasing the occasional baffled croak or curious whimper.
Ronnie’s not sure what’s up here but he knows this is his opportunity. Out the door, without pause, even as he snags keys, wallet and cell phone off the little end table in the doorway. He slams the door behind him, locks everything he can and turns to Joan.
Without word they face and embrace into a tight hug, each squeezing from the other a desperate reassurance that they were still there. Still real. Their bond a solid tether to the reality of their lives before this sudden outbreak of madness.
Joan finally pulls back and asks the much needed: “Now what?”
Ronnie doesn’t answer. Instead he walks around to the side of the house. Joan follows. Coming to a window Ronnie stands on his tippy toes to peer over the ledge. Joan comes up and stares in behind him. The Guest is still standing there boob tube transfixed.
“Now I make a call.” Ronnie’s answer comes time delayed, only at the familiar glow of his flipped open phone.
“The police?”
“With two pounds of weed and an eight ball in the bedroom. I don’t think so.”
“Somehow I think they’ll have other things on their mind.”
“Nah, baby…” Ronnie gazes off into the possibilities and gives a small shudder, “… sooner or later they’d have questions we wouldn’t wanna be answering. A lot of them and that’s a bunch of bullshit we don’t be needing right now.”
“So who you calling, a friend?”
“Nah, definitely not.” Ronnie snorts at the thought before reluctantly scrolling through the contacts on his phone. When he comes to the number marked ‘ASSHOLE’ he hits call.
The phone rings an inordinately long time before being answered. A muffled ‘hello’ from the other end is preemptively truncated by Ronnie – “Hey! I need you to get yer ass over to my place A.S.A. fuckin’ P! We have a problem!”
Follow those words across the call's flight. Launched up from Engineville in a bark to soar over the Little Star shopping district, up over the silhouetted skyline etched against the first waves of dusk. Vanish amongst the morning stars blinking faintly. Then trajectory found, they dive down into the city, pulling up to navigate the labyrinth of narrow side streets, main avenues and secret alleyways until finally descending through the ceiling of an abandoned hotel. Destination: The Gallows Town Inn. Inside we discover the boarded windows and padded doors of the inn contradicted by the presence of an occupied room. One inhabited solely by a shadow sitting cross-legged within the center of a day glow blue and spray paint red circle. Within the luminescent ring sigils burn bright as stars across the molded gray carpet. The shadow shoulders the phone while lighting up a cigarette.
“Talk to me, Ronnie.” The phosphorous white flash of a match reveals briefly the face of Adam Last. A puff of death sucked off a sick orange ember and with a snap of the wrist the room plunges back into darkness.
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no subject
on 2010-05-21 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-05-22 06:50 am (UTC)