Confessions of a Fuck-Up Artist!

Traffucked on 285, three lanes closed around a collision, riding the brake at a steady 5mph down an American Dream that has been downgraded to a roof over the head and a job to keep it there. It's cigarettes and NPR until the stories repeat and I'm in no mood for music and what the fuck does this asshole think he's doing? Fuck me, it's the new math over here: Jesus Fish + Stick Figure Family Sticker/ SUV = the Right of Way. Hold up, now there's a tanker co-piloted by what appears to be a blowup doll signaling to scooch over and what else can I do but yield? Meanwhile there's water on Mars on the radio and sirens screaming over the horns. I need quiet, stat. Kill the volume. Piledrive an American Spirit into an overfilled ashtray. Roll up the window. Crank up the air. Slip further into the steel womb migration crawl and as Dave Gahan would preach, I enjoy the silence.

"The large white spider that lives in my dreams asked about you again, Jack." Violet Larue speaks from the passenger seat. I shoot a glance her way. She's aged well, physique and face pretty much the same as when we dated in the twilight of the 20th century. The black Bauhaus t-shirt now a white sundress, the vinyl jacket a comfortable button up sweater, the nocturne makeup faded to a healthy tan, the empty arms filled with her newborn little girl.

"Heh," I answer focusing back on the tanker before me. Along its shell crawl a band of bandana and goggle masked punks, making their way to the cab where the blowup doll copilots instead of Jesus. Behind me a suit openly does a bump off the steering wheel of a BMW framed in the rearview mirror hell behind me.

"I told it that you were fine, that I read all your posts, and how they make me laugh sometimes." She continues and from the corner of my eye can see her rocking gently her baby.

I give a distracted nod. On my right an old man who has been blindfolded by the palms of a wild gorilla crouched in the backseat begins pounding on his horn before bolting off down the emergency lane.

"But then the large white spider that lives in my dreams told me it was worried about you," and her child gives the faintest of whimpers from her arms.

"Oh no," I mutter under my breath without looking at her. The punks crawling along the tanker are vandalizing its shell, wildstyle tags bright in fresh spraypaint begin to appear against the rain gloom commute.

"Yeah, I know, right? It told me that whatever it was that happened to you a few weeks back might've messed you up." She says and I can't help but see the worry in those big eyes of hers. "That you were afraid to write now after..."

I pound the horn in rage at no one at all.

A long, glorious blare into the chaos I've been jammed into as part of my begrudgingly given signature on the Social Contract. The punks on the tanker freeze in their tagging, the BMW suit behind me looks up mortified with a face caked in powder, even the blowup doll has peeked its face out of the passenger side window to regard my commotion.

Yeah, well fuck the punks and the suits and fuck you too, Rousseau for dreaming something grand enough for lesser men beat their betters down with.

I release the horn with a post-orgiastic grin.

There is but one asshole all men will forgive and that is their own.
But listen, now the baby's crying and Violet's hushing it with the coo of the mama phoenix to its young.

It's a long one hundred feet before she speaks again.

"How come you don't write about us anymore?"

I snort, catching first glimpse now of the wreck. A truck overturned, a plume of smoke, sirens, cops, EMTS, a man paid by the State to dress up as Death's Sad Harlequin holding up a cardboard sign that reads - NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

"Remember that night we tripped acid?" She says smiling down at her daughter. "The time you read our future with your tarot cards and I asked about our future and it came up with Satan?"

"Devil," I correct reaching to light up a cigarette until remembering the child.

"Right, 'Devil', that's what I meant, but remember what you did next?"

I don't answer, shit, I don't even so much as blink. Ahead of me one of the punks has finished his tag and is rappelling to the side of the tanker. In big red balloon letters the word - NOPE - burns before me.

"You scooped the cards off the coffin we used as a coffee table, remember that coffin, the one you and Bud grabbed from Masquerade?" She laughs and her daughter takes hold of her finger. "Anyway, then you grabbed me by the hand, dragged me into the bedroom, threw the entire deck onto the mattress and then threw me down on top of them . Remember what you said next?"
I focus on the spray-painted NOPE and pace my distance off it.

"You said - 'Fuck the future!' - and you tore a hole in my stockings and you laughed like a maniac doing it then you..."

The Baby cries again silencing her.

Another hundred or so feet until she quiets back down and her mom starts back up.

"The large white spider that lives in my dreams likes it when I tell him about the old days, it makes him smile when I talk of Bud and sometimes, when I follow the... the y'know, the what do you call it?"

"Strands?" I sigh as a black dirigible descend down above the tanker, dropping a series of ropes down from its mirrored canopy that the punks grab onto. The dirigible lifts and the punks rise like ninja angels with them. "Threads, maybe."

"Strands," she chooses, "when I follow the strands they lead me to him. He's right there in front of me laughing or screaming or on bad nights... crying."

The dirigible vanishes - all I can see left of the punks is the NOPE while the suit behind me shadowboxes his dashboard between key bumps.

"Then I wake up and I'm confused because I'm no longer the me who can talk to the large spider that lives in my dreams and my friends are far away or dead or different now... then I get scared that it was all just a dream and I've always been a boring old mom telling her kids no this and no that. Do you ever get that feeling?"

The tanker is picking up speed now, the catastrophe fading from the peripheral, up ahead the closed lanes promise an end.

"Was it real, Jack?" She says on a precipice of tears that she will not cross so long as she cradle's the life that she has carried.

"Where we? Real I mean."

"No Baby," I say by habit, "we were better than Real. We were vampires and supervillains, we were noble though often overly dramatic freaks. The inheritors of a post-apocalypse that never bothered to show up, the last chance at a fight that never happened, the children of the HIV 80s who grew up too fuck in gas masks and use safe words our love letters. We were too weird, beautiful, and full of ourselves to be believed much less real. Fuck real. You wanna know what real is?"

I take a hand off the wheel to motion outside the window. Traffic's a swift 20-25mph, the dull sheen of the tanker remains graffiti free, the suit in the BMW is on his phone, the wreck well behind me now as the lanes begin to open up gradually.

"That's reality." I scoff. "And for awhile there it was our unique privilege to have nothing to do with it."

But it's too late.

In making my point I banished her back to her back to the real world and the dreams of the large white spider that lives in them.

Free at last to indulge in my bad habits, I light up a cigarette and merge my attention back into reality.

"Do you know what sucks?" The Princess sighs in the red lamp glow of the Yacht.

"A sentient vacuum cleaner with an oral fixation?" I offer in my best Pinky sans the Brain voice.

"What?" She twists her face baffled for a moment then continues, "No, what sucks is what Dragon*Con used to be like for us. You'd be working on your DJ set for the big Secret Room dance and I'd be working on my costume. Something sleek, black, and tight. I'd walk into the Con and it felt like the whole world around me froze in time when everyone would look at me."

"I remember." I sip my drink and do just that. How after I set up the decks I'd have the sound guy connect me to the system, jack in the phones, lay out the boxes of CDs and then mutter to myself - 'Activate Emergency DJ protocols'. Some nights, when I was reallly nervous about the size of the room, I'd perform a banishing ritual right there in the booth drawing pentagrams with a lit Camel. Of course that shit always wigged out my old shipmate and then promoter.

"You're going to 'jinx' the whole show with all that Aleister Crowley shit."

"Hush now, War Dog," I'd tell him, "your Mid-West Provincial is showing and I need to focus on making bitches dance."

Back at the Yacht these decades later, portable phone-computer thing on the table blowing up with images from Con. First dispatches of good times scrolling in from the heart of downtown Terminus.Costumes, drinks, euphoria. I turn it off.

"C'mon, Princess, we had our time in the sun... days of X-Files armageddon and waiting for the William Gibson/Matrix tomorrow to shine on us her prophets and high priestesses. We were postapocalyptic freak punks bringing a little sexual anarchy to a grey world of call centers and cube farms. We rocked and what followed never managed to squeeze our genii back in the bottle."

"What happened?" She asks lighting a cigarette with that face of a little girl still reconciling that there's no Santa after all.

I pause with drink halfway to lips, ponder the question and answer, "We did the last thing we thought we'd ever do... survive this long. It sounds trite but between us we got enough dead names to fill out a graveyard and that we're not one of them yet is something to be thankful for."

"I know, I know" she says looking into her sugar free soda that just but a few years ago would have been a Vodka-Cran with limes, "I still miss it. I still miss us. Y'know all of us, what we were, what we were going to be."

"Me too, Princess," I sip my drink unable to look at her afraid to see how old the stranger might look reflected in her eyes, "me too."