Album 3: Let's Dance

Like weeds on a rock face waiting for the scythe,
Ricochet, ricochet.
The world is on a corner waiting for jobs,
Ricochet, ricochet.
Turn the holy pictures so they face the wall.
And who can bear to be forgotten?
And who can bear to be forgotten?

- David Bowie, Let’s Dance, 1983

People look better from far away and with clothes on.

From a distance everyone has the chance to look beautiful. But the closer you get, the more you see. My wife and child are on the other side of death’s fence and they are as gorgeous as cartoon characters. Outlined with ink and memory. Blemishes and bodily excretions blurred into bright technicolor slapsticks. Every argument and tantrum has long been exhumed, carved out of the mud and pus and filled in with Tiger Tail and spumoni ice creams. Happy dandelion fluffs suspended in a sky of misery.

This is what I think as I pull out a box-cutter and slash off Mercurio’s clothes. The hairs on his body were all black and coarse, kith and kin to their pubic cousins. The grey shadow of stubble punching through his cheeks and chin. Where he sits most often, on his fish belly white ass, errant red rosettes of pimples. His subcutaneous fat jiggling with the palsy of his blubbering and begging. From 20 feet away, with his clothes on, he probably picks up pretty regularly.

As I hack off his underwear, he begins blathering about the safe in his den and its combination.

He smiles because that stops me. Nodding like a retarded bobble-head. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll show you.”

I follow his mooning buttocks up the stairs. Forty years of shit eventually stain your crack no matter how well you wipe.

I have vague recall of shag rugs and overwrought oil paintings. The flash of a bedroom that even a pervert would call over-the-top. But his home office was Spartan and functional. Almost admirable.

Desk: all IKEA powder-coated aluminum and birch veneer. Probably called MUMBL or EFICENT or some other pig-English. Chair: the extra-ergonomic mesh weave that fools you into believing your ass isn’t slowly spreading into a shitting pancake. Shelves: lined stem to stern with the orange-beige volumes of Canadian law, and right up to date with the all the addenda. And then the real gold: 4 solid filing cabinets on wheels.

“Roll that one out,” , still hand-cuffed, he chin pecks at one of the cabinets. Keeping my eye on him, I pull the one forward. It moves as easily as a new-born Porsche.

“You can barely see it, but there’s a panel in the floor. Press down on any two corners.”

I do so. The panel whispers up an inch. I pull it out the rest of the way. Underneath, the eye of a combination lock stares up at me. The small safe nestles between floor beams. He gives me the combo. Very eagerly.

When I don’t start twisting the dial, he tries not to panic. When you’re naked, it’s harder to hide that you’re lying. On him, I noticed that his dick actually crawled further into his body.

He tempts me. “I got almost 50k in cash in there. Some coke. Plane tickets and hey, a few passports.” My hand goes to the filing cabinets. “There’s even a couple real special pornos. Imported from Cambodia. Stuff that goes all the way.” He tries to laugh, like you would with a buddy who’s looking at the waitress’ tits too.

The safe also might contain a silent alarm. I put in the wrong combination, and the cops, especially for this snotty neighbourhood, are here at the speed of light.

I turn the mask down at him. Time for it to speak.

I knock on the top of the filing cabinet. The mask says, “Who’s buried in here?”

With the audio-modulator that I wired into the mask, my voice hisses out of two 1-inch speakers in my helmet. I went for a cross between Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and Darth Vader in an underground garage. A resistor on one speaker causes a split second delay so it almost sounds like there are two voices. I smelled Mercurio start to lose control of his asshole.

I knock the cabinet again. Harder.

“Juh… juh… just clients. The good stuff is in the safe, man.”

I put one hand on the handle of the cabinet. The other on the corner. I start to pull.

He manages a laugh. “They’re locked. They won’t open.” I can’t hear him. The muscles, the anterior deltoids, the trapezius where it grabs my skull, behind the ear. They’re making too much noise as they bunch up. Like a bale of straw compacting, rustling against its own fibres.

As the lock on the cabinet pops, Mercurio’s breath escapes him. “Oh fu…”

For the next four hours, I’m going through files. Mercurio’s certainly got the lungs for lawyering. Despite his incessant nattering, I learn how to go for the liver of each client file. Find the charges. Any that mention racketeering, gang-related offenses, extortion, loan-sharking, high-level trafficking, ownership of buildings that have been implicated in prostitution or human trafficking, all that good shit. The stack is half as tall as me.

Four hours of office work. The adrenalin has long worn off. The crick in my neck hurts worse because of the weight of the mask and helmet.

I turn it on to Mercurio again. “Up,” hisses Darth Hopper. Merc moves, moaning about how he’s had to piss for the past two hours. I lift the 30 pounds of files and shoulder him back downstairs to his gigantic living area.

He watches me empty his gym bag and stuff the files in it. Maybe it was just the dawn sun starting to trickle in his tinted windows, but he looked like he was turning a bit green. His worried “What’re you gonna do with those?” gets shut up, when I force him to “Show me your kitchen.”

“Why?” He tries humour. “You getting hungry? Heh.”

“No,” I breathe, “This box cutter’s too sharp.”

In his granite countered, monolithically-applianced kitchen, I find a thick, short knife. He probably pares guavas with it.

“Whattya need with that?” My answer is to shove him back to the grand plains of his living room. I sit him in what I judge is the middle.

He flops down on his back. “God, I’m so fucking tired.” I yank him by his hair back into a sitting position. “What?” he groans, like he’s gotten used to all this.

“I need your balls on the floor, motherfucker.”

Now he’s awake all over again. A gibbering rubber-lipped lawyer.

“Spread your fucking legs.” He mouths off more. I put the tip of the paring knife half an inch up his left nostril. “Or I could just kill you instead.”

He slowly spreads his legs. The shudder and stutter over the hard wood. His cock has climbed nearly completely into his pelvis. A purple turtle head barely poking out of its shell. All that extra skin that he probably describes as 8 inches of heat-seeking moisture missile has to go somewhere; and so his scrotum sags all the way to the red oak flooring.

I need time to hop his fence and scramble through the ravine back to my car. But I want him alive so he can tell his shit-hole clients that somebody’s got all their files… their addresses.

I raise the knife. 

“Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus.” He chants. I ram the knife down between his legs, straight through his nut sack and 3 inches into the floor.

I managed not to hit a testicle. He can pull himself away from it. He’ll only have to slice through about an inch of scrotal skin.

When his 10 second scream peters out, I jam the mask in his face.

“Tell them. All of them. That I’m coming.”

As I leave, I notice he finally took that piss.

Enough About Him, What About Me?

You’ll have to forgive my fascination with superheroes. If I was into the therapy, I’d probably be diagnosed with an obsessive neurosis about vigilantes in star-spangled costumes.

But if I did join the ever expanding ranks of the “mentally ill”, I suspect I’d learn that a fetishist’s love of patterned granny panties or a cutter’s desire for the sting of bloody release stems from simple things.

Me, I don’t feel any pain.

No, really. There are only about 30 of us in the world. It’s called Congenital Indifference to Pain with Anhidrosis or CIPA. For those who care, Wikipedia’s pretty on top of the physical side of things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain_with_anhidrosis.

For those who prefer life to be an unending cavalcade of summaries, let’s say that my nervous system has formed or malformed in such a way that I don’t feel pinches, burns, impacts, bites… anything that the other 7.6 billion humans would consider painful.

Hey, wow, eh? Many of you are probably now leaping-in-a-single-bound to the conclusion that I would make the perfect superhero. I’ve got my first power: immunity to pain. Sorry to disappoint, but the inability to feel a knife in your guts simply means you’ll bleed to death because you don’t know there’s a blade tickling your duodenum.

This is probably a better example. When I cut my first tooth as a toddler, I was in emergency six times in a week. Blood would spontaneously start pouring from cuts in my lips or on my tongue. It was a simple conclusion that I was biting myself; but I never cried about it. There would suddenly be a gory patch of fresh blood on my Scooby-Doo bib. My mother would gasp like a tire imploding, and little me would laugh and giggle at the funny face my horrified mom was making.

She told me later that one intelligent – read "sadistic" – doctor poked my pudgy cherubic heels with lancets. Each time, a pill of blood would bulge out, but I would continue to suck on the tongue depressor the nice man in the bright white coat had given me.

The diagnosis: CIPA. The treatment: like a leper, I had to be watched constantly. If I swallowed a safety pin, I’d die of internal bleeding. External cuts go unnoticed, infect, and I could die of advanced sepsis.

My first five years of life were spent on the inside of windows looking at kids on bikes and in swings and falling out of tree-houses. Carelessly they skinned their knees, were stung by bees, and whined about tiny splinters in their neurologically perfect finger-tips.

I went from the prison of a padded crib, to wearing knee pads and leather mittens on the rare instances that I went outside.

After twelve years of living with the learned fear of injury, surely my teenage years became a riotous release of rebellious extroversion, right?

Briefly, yes. For three months of my fourteenth year, I said fuck-it and did everything all the other kids were doing. With predictable results.

I went to the high-school dance and woke up the next morning with grapes of swelling around the knuckles of two toes which I had dislocated. My wrist had locked up around the bone-chips that I had knocked loose. Must have been the slam dancing.

I learned to drive a car. Slammed the door on a thumb, crushing it flat. Hilariously I simply tried to yank it out, like you might do when your coat or seat belt gets caught in there.

And, here’s some intimate honesty for you, I ruptured a testicle losing my cherry to Amy Rooks. She seemed to really enjoy when I slammed hard into her hole. That wet smack-smack-smack sound made her chin jut up and even virgin-balled me knew it felt really good to her. So I increased the speed and the impact. We both came. And a half-hour later my left nut was the size of a lemon. I didn’t fuck anybody again until I was twenty-two.

Amy helped re-institute my isolation by telling everybody about my self-induced testicular gigantism. I withdrew to the library during spares, lest I hear the chant of “Coconut”.

And that’s when I forged my relationship with that gallant tribe of people known as super-heroes. We had something in common: physical pain was unknown to us. Comic books were a world where I could belong.

It was natural then that I started to draw. As long as you stay away from exacto-knives, it’s really hard to hurt yourself in art class. Poking yourself with a sharpened pencil or a pen nib is manageable. It was another link, a wider, more intimate entry way into super-hero-land.

I was now creating the over-sized bosoms of the wonderful women and the mountainous biceps of the marvelous men who were my mentors and confidantes.

So, that’s what I do. If you were at a party and you needed to label me, you’d ask that: “So what do you do?” I’m a freelance graphic artist. Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, all the way down to the stone-age tools of pen, ink and paints.

And that’s why I really want this guy to be a superhero. Record-man. Diary-dude. The Masked Diary Writer. Maladaptive Coping Strategy Man. I’m forcing the issue, I know. I truly want it to be true.

Or so his sister Rebecca, the estate salesperson, told me when she called me back this past weekend and asked me out for coffee.

Album 2: Rock & Roll Machine

And we don't need the lady
Cryin' 'cause the story's sad.
Rocky mountain way
Is better than the way we had.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…

- Rocky Mountain Way, Triumph, 1977

No, I don’t feel guilty.

I’ll feel guilty when the suits on Bay St. stop smirking over their human shaped stepping stones. When the corporations stop trumpeting their billions of dollars of profits off the back of millions of dollar-a-day third world slaves. When religious zealots of all stripes stop putting guns or righteousness into the hands or heads of their brainwashed children.

It’s a long line before it’s my turn to feel the guilt I deserve.

As far as I had researched, Mercurio Palsemetti* had no family-shaped vacuum in his life. I’d have to let him know what that’s like. Maybe we’d have time to chat about denying our guilt too.

From what I’ve been able to glean so far, the organized criminals in Ontario have been able to keep to themselves through an unspoken geography of territories. The two minute ejaculation of violent stupidity that brought me into this was an exception. But it’s not just their “business is business” attitude that keeps things quiescent. There’s a criminal buffer between the larger groups. A cartilage that prevents the bones from scraping together. The sinovial fluid gang, if you will.

Mercurio is their lawyer. Yes, somebody has to represent them, but does he have to be so flagrantly rich about it? From the number of quotes this guy has in the Star and the Sun, you’d think he has his thumb on their publishers.

Palsemetti’s digs were north of Toronto, blessed with a wonderful ravine view and sequestered behind a twelve foot iron and masonry wall. The main house was over 4000 square feet. The coach house housed an indoor pool. Lucky coach. I knew the layout because I obtained the blueprints for fifty dollars at a municipal government office; rich folk have contractors renovating their places so often, they get tired of asking for ID and permit numbers.

I assumed he had a security system, and the movie action stars might be able to “tap” into the security cameras or snip the green wire, but this ex-I.T. professional for a large medical lab firm can’t even hotwire a kid’s tricycle.

So while my ribs and cheek bone reformed their relationships with the rest of my body, I sat in a car, following, stalking, getting to know all about Mercurio. Now every time I see the sculpted nasal bone of a BMW Roadster, I get that little hormonal jazz under my diaphragm.

His schedule was a nightmare. Completely unpredictable. Sometimes he’d come home at 8 p.m. Other times long after midnight. So I parked three miles away, nearly broke an ankle climbing down into the ravine and got into my evening wear. Kevlar is the new black.

That day before all this, I watched my wife sob so deeply she gagged on her own vomit. Since the day she left, I’ve added fifty pounds of muscle. I was never out of shape, but I never imagined I’d be able to bench press over 500 pounds. As I nearly hurled myself over that fence, the shrunken balls, the bacne and that new ache in my liver became completely worth it.

I hunkered in the back corner of his yard, nervous about motion detectors, and watched his football field long driveway for those blinding Roadster halogen headlights. How many accidents have those arrogant fucking things caused? Why aren’t they illegal? I told myself that if I didn’t get what I wanted from him, I’d smash those damn floodlights on my way out.

Finally a car turns in. Automatic gate opens without a squeak. Half way down the drive I hear one of the 3 garage doors start to open, automatically. Automatically, I sprint for the back of his house. As his car/penis slides into his house/vagina, I roll in behind. I’m this S.O.B’s new S.T.D.

Mercurio hauls his ass and a gym bag out of the car. This guy is in half-decent shape. But all he has to bench-press right then is the alarm code beside the door that leads from the garage into the house.

As the last digit of the code is in, I charge. My shoulder rams him in the lumbar/kidney area. For the next month, he’ll piss pink and think of me.

Our combined weight cracks the door in half. About ten seconds later, he’s in hand-cuffs and I’ve tasered him twice in the throat. Just for the pure fuck-with-him of it.

It’s May --, 199-. Approximately 11:30 p.m. He’s got a long night ahead of him.

• Bloggist’s note: Not his real name obviously, but he needs a moniker because he comes back later.

Paranoia Sets In

The second after I put up the last entry, I looked at it with a mental squint. I had been looking at these hand-written documents as being fundamentally true. My therapist said that despite my background, I was an "idealist romantic". Or maybe it was romantic idealist. Whatever.

What if these damn papers were just the oozings of a unpublished bi-polar who happened to die of booze and anti-depressants?

I took a day’s worth of spare-time and travelled on-line and through microfiched newspapers. Nothing about a multiple murder in any alley of the Greater Toronto Area. Not on the day that it supposedly happened and not the days around it.

(Note: There was a very significant gun related incident in Toronto day that day. It's so unique that I'm making no mention of it, because the instant that I do, even Google drop-outs would be able to pin down the exact date. I'm not exactly sure how, but I worry that single thread might lead them to being able to trick out a street name or, worse, a person's.)

The light of my super-hero fantasy was dimming rapidly. It had only one person and one place of contact left.

I sat and thought for half a day, determining a plan of attack and deciding how far I was willing to go. That set, it was a simple matter to research the ownership of the estate sale house, and, because of a pretty unique last name, calling twelve numbers (out of a possible twenty-seven) and asking the potentially morbid question, “Are you related to a Ted P-----?”

Six apologies, 4 hang-ups and a “No, but I could be anyone you want for 50 bucks” later, I recognized the voice of the woman on the other end even before asking the question. And the pause before she answered was familiar too.

“Who is this?” Her voice was the underside of a rotted log. Tired, sad, a lone centipede of thin anger.

“The estate sale a few days ago. I was your ‘first customer of the day’. I bought the record collection.”

“Right, Mr. Twenty-bucks.” Again a pause, which is only an absence of sound, everything else is still there. “We don’t do returns,” she said trying to keep it light.

“Oh no,” I returned with a laugh in my voice, “No problem with the product... or the service.” Remember the plan. “I’ve been listening to the albums,” I lied, “and I realized that Ted must have been a pretty young guy to…”

“… to be dead,” she finished mercifully.

“Yeah. I thought it might be appropriate... I was wondering if I could make a donation to whatever health problem he had... Y'know?”

“Health? Oh, you mean like the Heart and Stroke Foundation or muscular dystrophy or something.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“That’s really nice of you, but I don’t think…” Nervous breath-laugh up over the bone in her throat. “It’s just that they don’t know what killed him.”

I pushed it a bit. “Oh, ‘natural causes’.”

She leaned over the emotional fence and said, “There wasn’t a body.”

“Oh.”

“But there was too much blood for him to have survived.”

The distance between us grew so fast right then, I could almost feel the air rushing by my ears. She was hearing me go. She must have witnessed that in other peoples’ voices, in other peoples’ eyes, a dozen or more times, every time she explained what happened to her brother, cousin, whatever he was to her.

My grandma had a cataract, frozen milk that had poured in over a beautiful teriyaki brown. It kept her safe and smiling. Through funerals and cancers, and from seeing a once-spotless house peeling down around her. It excused her from caring about anybody or anything.

Two good eyes and I was no different.

“That’s terrible. Sorry to bother you.”

“No, it’s okay.” Yeah, she had watched a few cataracts grow in her time.

“Thanks for your time.”

“No problem.”

“Bye now.”

“Bye.”

I’m no super-hero.

Real Life Super-powers #1: Human Echolocation

It's not Daredevil and his radioactively amplified hearing, but it is documented echolocation in humans.

It does require you to be blind, and further to develop your blindness early or late in life. I've missed the early life, but how long do I wait to blind myself? I plan on living till I'm about 130 years old, but the average is still somewhere in the 70's. I don't want to miss the party trick of the century.

Except that I think I may be partially deaf, I'm predisposed to this power. I can already tell when my wife comes into the bedroom. Even her slender quiet form leaves a sound shadow as she passes in front of the running dehumidifier.

Twenty bucks to first true-believer who can use echolocation to determine if a criminal is telling the truth.

Album 1: Rock 80

Waiting by the shoreline

In Somalia for your reply

I need you to come see me

That's no lie

The guns are getting close

The sweat pours like dew

That fell from the trees in Tripoli

In the spring

I'm white hot

I can't take it anymore

I'm white hot
By the Somalian shore

Yes, I'm burning to the core
I need rain.

- Red Rider, White Hot, 1980

Fuck it all, that didn’t happen like I visualized.
 

All the training, all the preparation, all the research… over a year and a half, and I’m sitting here with – according to my self-diagnosis using a few reputable internet sources – 16 self-inflicted stitches, a dislocated shoulder, 6 circular bruises where the bullets must have hit, and since it hurts to breathe I suspect 2 broken ribs just above the floaters on the left side, and it even hurts to smile so I’m pretty sure that guy stomped me a broken orbital or cheek bone, wherever those zigomatic or risorius muscles attach.

I know it hurts when I smile because I smiled afterwards. Before the rush wore off. As I was taking off the get-up in a subway washroom stall. After I puked in the toilet (well, half in the toilet). I nodded to myself and a stupid grin peeled back on my face. I had done it and I was still sucking air. I was actually alive.

And 5 of them were dead.

I was armoured up and I sat in that stinking dumpster for at least a half hour. Every doubt I thought I had dealt with since April --, 20--, came back to me. I doubted why I was there; I doubted every hour of my physical training; I questioned the efficacy of the drugs; I certainly doubted my sanity for waiting in the dark off an alley on ---4 Q---- Street East.

But the single diamond hard point that was unassailable was that somebody had to deal with them. Even if all the one-on-one cognitive and group therapy, even if all the anti-depressant and occasional anti-psychotic meds worked and turned me back into a normal functional human being, somebody had to do this.

So I sat until I heard their two vehicles pull up. Adjusted my legs under me, hoping they wouldn’t cramp up as soon as I straightened them. Listened to their macho bullshit chatter as they came closer. Dialed in my night-vision visor when I heard them whining about the light over the back door being out. And just as one guy, the fattest one, squealed when he stepped on the three inch caltrops I had spread around the door, I tossed out the flash grenade into their midst, covered my eyes for two and half seconds.

First mistake, I smashed the dumpster lid up as I jumped out. I hit it so hard it gonged off the brick wall behind and again when it shut. They couldn’t see but now they had a focus, a direction.

Even so, I killed two before any of them could pull a pistol from their belts, shoulder holsters, or in the case of Squealing Fat Boy, from the crack of his greasy cottage-cheesed ass.

A pat on my own back: I made the right choice going for the serrated edges on the two Spyderco Civilian G-10’s.

One of the guys, a chinless fuck with an over-dose of old-man’s cologne, had his head only half on after I dragged the blade across the middle of his throat. From what I had experienced in those 10 days at the slaughter-house in O-----, the cartilage and bone in the larynx might have saved the guy’s life. But at the abattoir, I wasn’t this amphetamined maniac who had jumped out of a dumpster dressed in a black Kevlar Halloween costume. And of course, there was the mask.

I sliced through that guy’s Adam’s apple like it was a rotten McIntosh.

The second guy was twisting away, running and pulling his gun, kind of bent over. So I got him in the lower back, started at what I hoped was a kidney and pumped my arm twice. Sawing my way in towards his spine. I actually felt the knife’s serrations go clickety over the bone. I twisted like I practiced. On a pig, it opened the wound wider. Not immediately deadly, but let this shithead bleed out. I had 3 more. All of them with their guns out by now.

Out and firing.

Mother-fuckers didn’t care now if they shot their buddies.So that’s what scared people do. I’ll have to remember that.

I figured there would be gun fire. I mean that’s why I was here murdering them in the first place. I had hung out at a firing range just to get used to the sound; so it wouldn’t freeze me up. I had molded rubber ear protection in under my helmet. But it was still so goddamned loud. That close, the percussion of bullets being catapulted out of the muzzle, it actually jars your bones. I could feel my teeth rattle inside my mouth-guard.(When I had spit it out later, I saw that I had actually bitten clean through it.)

The first three rounds that hit me caught me square in the gut. Knocked the wind out of me, making me drop one of the blades. Finally, something went as I expected. My breath was gone, but the anaerobic training allowed me to get to the next guy. Some muscle bound freak who might have been taking more steroids than me.

But no matter how shrunken the roids make his balls, he still noticed when my steel-toed combat boot knocked them up into his oesophagus.

As he crumpled over, I slammed my knife down, hammer-fisted it right through his back ribs and into his heart. It jammed in there. Maybe between two ribs, or maybe his Hulk-like trapezius muscles had contracted around it. It happened with the pigs; sometimes you had to put a foot on them, and use both hands to yank it out.

Two more slugs told me I didn’t have that kind of time. One off the thigh. And one straight off the knee cap, hyper-extending it. Kevlar and alumina ceramics kept the joint from completely exploding.

Fat Boy’s buddy charged me. Bulled me over and started stomping on my head. That trashed the night vision. Lights started to explode inside my skull.

My brain was bouncing around in my skull. Unconsciousness started to creep up. It was really peaceful. Like a big thick duvet that your grandma would pull up to your chin on Christmas Eve. Heavy and lulling.

I was ready for that. I had planned that this is the situation in which I would actively think of them.

I don’t know that the army has dreamed up this kind emotional training yet. The dress as the enemy and brutally kill the two most important people in your life. Right in front of you. And then use your memories of them, everything gentle and soothing, like the skip of her flip-floppered feet over the old peeling floorboards at the cottage. Like the surprised happy-shock when the puppy decided to lick the inside of her little mussel shaped ear.

Take those most powerful memories, practice getting over the barf-inducing sobs and super-charge them into an anger so pointed you can feel sweat prickling through your skin.

Cognitive behaviour therapy turned on its fucking ass.

With that lightning coursing through me, my head turned into a painless rock. With the image of the back of her head exploding onto the black rubber of a car tire, I grabbed his patent-fucking-leather-shoed foot and twisted it so hard, I felt his knee come crunchingly unglued.

He fell wailing. I rolled up and hammered his useless knee with the knucks I had built in to my gloves.

As a piece of her skull flapped a white flag in slow motion, I kept smashing at his knee until it was the consistency of school-room mucilage.

Distantly I noticed Fat Boy pinging a shot off my helmet and one into my side.

I took my jack-hammering hand over to Patent-Leather’s head. The dome of the skull hardens as you get older, but there are these lines of cartilage through it, called sutures. I pounded. It only took three shots, and his head caved along the sutures. The membranous bag that held his brain together split so fast, he didn’t even have time to twitch.

Fat Boy was all out of bullets and his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He had watched it all. With the caltrops embedded in his fat feet, he couldn’t run. And the tetanus bacteria on the spikes would let him live long enough to tell them. He could blather until his fat fucking jaw locked right up.

I turned the mask to him.

That mask is the only artistic thing I’ve ever made in my life.

The look on Fat Boy’s face told me it was a masterpiece.

“You tell them.” My voice, powered by the emotional and physical drain of what I had just accomplished, resonated through the cave of my throat. “You tell the rest of them.”

And then I ran. Ran before my insides turned to liquid and I started Hershey squirting in my pants.

62 Records in the Crate

That was Monday. The crate must’ve stayed on the floor outside my bathroom till Saturday. Saturday is a day you can take extra long craps. You sit on the throne relaxing in the breezy luxury of being bare-assed. Relaxation at one end allows thoughts to drift into the other.

Sometimes you close your eyes and wonder why it is your smell only makes other people puke. Sometimes you look about the bathroom, noticing how you should clean the dried dew drops off the mirror or fix the toilet handle that needs jiggling each time it’s flushed.

And other times you read. Things you wouldn’t bother to read anywheres else suddenly become mesmerizing. The snake-oil descriptions on the back of a shampoo bottle. The we-assume-you’re-a-cheap-rummy warnings on rubbing alcohol. The tiny print that informs you the nail clippers have already travelled farther than you ever will.

That Saturday, the edge of the crate was poking past the horizon of the bathroom door jamb.

I had to actually raise my ass off the toilet to reach it. But I did, and dragged it over the linoleum. I didn’t plan to look at all of them, so I slid a sleeve up and out from the middle.

The Go-Go’s “Vacation”. The pinkily-clad girls in a water-skiing pyramid on the front. Boy, Belinda became far cuter after she left the other ladies behind. I peeked in the opening and the black-blue gloss of the record winked at me. I rolled it out, maybe just to see how big the unavoidable scratches on it would be. Maybe to see how they did the sticker around the spindle hole.

Why is long forgotten now.

That one extra-long crap session on that one particular Saturday in late August went a lot longer. The blood-infused pressure circle on my ass must have taken a month to wear off.

Along with the disk, two hand-written sheets were tucked in the jacket. The first page began in mid-sentence, so it wasn’t the first first page. I’m not one to spoil a story for myself by reading the last page of a novel; hell, I freak on anybody who tells me what happens on the next DVD of the Sopranos.

I left the pages unread. Put them back in the sleeve. And went to the end of the crate where I surmised that the beginning would be. That first disk was "K-Tel’s Rock 80". And the two pages that peeled off either side of its record were numbered.

One page started with a circled number one.

Three hours later, twenty minutes after my ass started to have the pins and needles, I reluctantly wiped, flushed and popped my knee joints straight.

I had read 7 of the 62 albums’ hidden diary pages. The author’s tight, crabbed, slightly slanted scrawl was burned on the white parts of my eyes. Whenever I blinked, I could see it in red on the inside of my eye-lids.

The guy who wrote it – a guy who I realized was now dead – would never call himself this, but it was obvious to me. These pages, this diary was written by a superhero.