In the drive: Trouble no more by John Mellencamp

From quasi-child molesters to things you barely remember from math class. My life is grand.

It's technically tomorrow, I guess. I must have snoozed off sometime around 4 a.m., and Nunzio Capelli, my erstwhile patient, was up around 7 a.m., cooking the Breakfast of Legbreakers (scrambled eggs and scotch). I wasn't up for most of it, having been worn to a frazzle the day before, and forgetting how damn comfortable bean bag chairs can be. Anyway, E and Nunzio had a chat about things, and it turns out that our faceless friend may have a deeper connection to the Capellis than we thought.

It occurs to me that a lot of what I say is actually a composite of things we learned throughout the day, and by doing that, I may omit certain people, but given who we're dealing with, perhaps a bit of anonymity is useful.

There was this girl named Heddy Parker, with a questionable taste in men. First, there was Tommy, apparently a Gothboy loser who she dumped for the likes of Peter Capelli. Faithful readers will recall that Peter was the fella missing a few eyes and with a loop of intestine danging to his dangler that showed up last night, killed by faceless guy. Peter, displaying a wonderful comprehension of the mating rituals of the free-range Guido, kills Heddy. Oh, and steals a cat, I guess.

See, that's key. When Mr. No-face showed up, he screamed, "Where's the cat?" to the eye-less Peter, who didn't bother to reply. At the time, we were all distracted too much trying to stay alive to pay attention, but there you have it. No-face was looking for a damn cat, and No-eyes didn't have it. I also have one more tidbit that Z reminded me of--No-face had numerous drawers in his chest (his torso-chest, not his friggin' hope-chest) that he extracted things from. He had a screwdriver in his ear and a chicken in his pocket. Or maybe he was just happy to see me--it was hard to tell, staying alive and all.


All of this MIGHT be about a cat, and it MIGHT be about a teenage girl who didn't have the sense not to date a member of the mob. Whatever the case, two people are dead and I'm still crapping my pants at the thought of the return of Mr. No-Face. I'm still trying to figure out how the hell I got myself into all of this.

Back to the narrative. We figure that we have to find Mr. No-Face before he recovers from his non-existent damage and comes after us. So in classic horror movie fashion, we decide to split up, only it's okay, because we're NOT in a horror movie, right? Show you what I know. E and N stick around to do some research. N's is more legitimate, using a computer and whatnot. E goes downstairs to his lab, which I'd normally see as a classic defense mechanism, only I'm getting the impression that E does more down there than futz with the amount of nitrogen in his batches of LSD. Before we left, he asked us if we wanted something that would make everyone our friends, or something that would help Z with her memory. Clearly the latter is more important, but I could see the strengths of the former. And then I realised, what the hell. Are we going to have to slip this 'friend maker' into everyone's drink? Apparently not. Apparently you take it, and everyone just RESPONDS. How weird is that? The weirdest thing about it is that N and Z are acting as if a drug like that is totally normal and, more to the point, the fact that my addled adoptive father can brew it up in his basement is No Big Thing. At that point, I was content to just hit the road, and let the tabs fall where they may.

The rest of us - Z, D, and me were off to a carnival, which apparently was where Peter and the rest of the Goombahs were meeting No-Face and his crew to arrange some sort of exchange, and was where Peter lost his eyes. Before we could hit the road, Danny asked for a ride to the junk yard to get a new gas tank for the motorcycle E told him he could have if he fixed it up. After Danny's help yesterday, I wasn't going to deny him ANYTHING. He also wanted to drive by the local Sears to get his picture taken. It makes sense, given that we just found out his dad's getting out of prison (Wilbur, Terri and Danny's dad, is a psychotic piece of shit, about whom the less said, the better...I have a feeling that, since he's getting out, he'll be playing a larger role in our lives. That won't be too healthy for Terri and Danny, so maybe I can recruit a little help from D to make it not too healthy for Wilbur). I also needed to track down my wife, Terri, who took off last night after seeing No-Face.

We follow the trail of breadcrumbs to Dante, E's chief rival. He sold her $100 worth of friendship, and she went elsewhere. When we got to the motel she'd crashed at, I discovered that she hadn't used, but had stayed up all night, sketching dozens of pictures of No-face on a sketch pad. Given that she hadn't used, and that her using diminishes her talents, they were quite good. Too bad each one made my memory of last night come back to vivid reality. She agreed to take Danny, which was just as well, since she and he need to talk about Wilbur.

There's also something else that's bugging the hell out of me. Danny's a mutterer. It's in his nature, given his brutal father and his desire to slip between the cracks at school, coupled with a serious case of ADHD that won't let him stay completely quiet. Some of his comments are typically inappropriate, but a few are downright disturbing. Had he been a patient in the ER, muttering those things, I would have probably issued a psych consult, just to be on the safe side. He seems to hold a lot of anger towards women. ("Dirty whores", etc) We can't afford to get him help, so that means we just have to pay more attention to what's going on with him. Like I needed one more person on my plate.

Off to the carnival, which was useful with the information gathering in the Long Run, the Long Run lasting over three hours, wherein we shadowed a goth-y girl that Z did a good job interrogating without getting on her bad side. I think Z would make a good cop, or maybe a good CSI. In the midst of all this, D wanders off after a carnie, and he doesn't come back after a good long while. Z and I take off after him, and we find him in a little clearing between the trailers, sitting on the ground, seriously messed up. Not physically, but mentally. He's totally out of it, telling us we need to track down those cops from last night and KILL THEM! D claims to have seen the ghost of Bennie, one of the Goombahs who died last night (and were hauled away by said cops, one of whom apparently eats said corpses and the other eats his said shit). I don't think either of them is really a contributor to society as a whole, but c'mon! A cop's a cop, and a cop that apparently in the pocket of the local mob family is doubly hard to 'erase'.

We get back home, only to discover that, while we were gone, the Head Guido came and picked up both E and N, for a 'sit down'. Before I got booted, I had occasion to review Boss Capelli's chart, and was pleased to discover he had pancreatic cancer, which is exceedingly painful and 100% fatal. Well, he's still kickin', and he believes that the cat that Peter Capelli stole has given his wang new life, and thinks it'll keep the rest of him alive. He's nervous that No-face and the rest of his merry crew (which was pretty much One Dead Goth, last I checked) will come after them. Them. The ones with all the weapons a thriving vig industry can afford. We're supposed to make No-face go away WITHOUT giving him the cat, even though it's pretty obvious that No-face wants the cat and nothing less. To seal the deal, Boss Capelli gives E and N the cat to take home. That's a bit like securing Noah's Ark by giving it to a colony of termites, but I digress.

The cat's a statue, about 1.5 ft high, with four sides. It has numbers carved on the side. One might think it was some sort of ushabti, unless, of course, one spotted the "Made in Japan" label on the bottom. The numbers are in fact the Fibonacci Sequence, where you start with 1 and 2, and add the last two numbers in the sequence to get you the next. So it's 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 33, 54, etc. What makes the FS so important is that it's one of those neat things that creates patterns we see all throughout nature (you can tell by now that I had to do a report on this in grade school, right?) The key thing was the Golden Mean, which was discovered by the Greeks and describes the curve of the Nautilus shell and the proportions found in the body. E's all into alchemy, and he was pretty jazzed by all this, as was N. How this makes Boss Capelli get a stiffy is beyond me, but hey, I just patch people who've had their eyes ripped out here. I did notice a seam, so it could be opened, if we were so inclined. I'm not. I've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark. I know what happens next.



Seeing as how it was hollow, I recommended taking it over to a friend with an x-ray machine he wasn't using. No one laughed at the CAT scan joke. Man, that would have KILLED the radiology geeks! Inside was a fat load of non-descript crap. Something metal. Something phallus-shaped. The usual, really. N wanted to pop it open right then and there. I really don't know how he scores with women as well as he does. He reminds me of the kid who's eaten waaay too much sugar at breakfast, and wants to know if he can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich using pop-tarts for bread.

So we get back, and Bunny's there. Bunny, great. Bunny is E's current girlfriend, and is apparently a hell of a businesswomen, aside from the scag habit that makes her bubble over at the realization that she has ONE MORE VEIN that hasn't collapsed, and could E put it in for her? Eh.

I'm in the kitchen, getting away from the domestic bliss, when Bunny and E decide to come in and we get attacked by the fruit. At some point, I suppose I should have mentioned N noticing the eyeballs on the top of the fridge. Some sick bastard plugged Peter Capelli's eyes (at least I HOPE they're his eyes, else there's someone missing a pair) into the outlet back there, and left them for us to find. At least, that was my impression. E and N start going off about how we're being spied upon, which is a little 'jumping to conclusions' in my book. Anyways, the fruit. It attacks. A cantaloupe that blended right in, being all pink and soft and nasty, and, let's face it, no one eats cantalope in the damn house, so why do we keep buying it, especially if it's just going to attack us?

But it's no mere cantalope. This fleshy pink globe sprouts legs like a spider and scuttles after E. His reflexes ain't what they used to be, so it gets a good grab on his face, and starts gnawing on his forehead. He slams it into the countertop, and it seems to do more damage to him than it. I score a few good hits with a ginzu, figuring that I can probably do a melonectomy with the best of them, right? Between me, E, and I think Z (holding the camera all the while she swings on it), we free E, who proceeds to kick it to death, screaming, "Die, you fucking puppy!"

That's right. Remember the puppy that disappeared last night? We assumed George the Cowardly Goombah took it. Nope, it was apparently No-face, who has mad reconstructive surgery skills, on top of his not-dying-anytime-soon skills. I examined the corpse, and indeed, it was the puppy. Which means that E knew it when he was kicking it to death, which means E kicked a puppy to death.

Did I ever mention that E's not a very good hippie?

So, y'know, that called for a shower, considering the night is far from over. We have to stake out the club where Tommy, Heddy's ex-boyfriend and his Goth gang might be hanging out. We also have to take a look at the carnival, under appropriate lighting. Oh, yes, and N's teaching assistant / screwtoy is having a party, and we're all invited. Also, my mother-in-law, the perfect companion to my psychotic embezzling father-in-law stopped by, and wanted to move in. E shooed her off, and she left her double headed dildo on the front lawn, just to show him what he's missing out on, I guess.

On a brighter note, I just got laid, so all's good in the world. Bring on the mutant cantalope puppies!

Just kidding, God. I could do without those.

In the drive: Liz Phair by Liz Phair

Gah, that was nasty. I have a sneaking suspicion that the events of tonight will leave a lingering impression, and I so don't want to attach the taste (or smell) of something I love with all of this bullshit, a la Clockwork Orange. So I steered clear of my precious Bombay and tonic and went for the malt liquor that D offered.

Fuck. I liked it. After 25 years of steering clear of brown paper bags and stone cold 40s, I discover a real hankering for the bull piss. Go figure.

Anyway, so the THING shows up. I thought the Goombah at my feet was fucked up. This THING had no facial features to speak of -- no eyes, ears, nose, mouth, etc. We're talking hard core plastic surgery, or birth defects that make Thalidomide look like a tasty alternative. But none of those things prevented IT from apparently tracking them across Bakersfield to E's domicile, and kicking all our asses to boot.

Nothing stopped IT. I figured at first IT must be cranked on PCP and wearing kevlar, because the numerous rounds the goombers and D pumped into IT had absolutely no effect. Then that BASTARD took one in the face, and for a second, I cheered, like it was a movie and Jason had impaled himself on a neutron bomb seconds before it went off. But just like in that dumb-ass movie, when, deep down inside, you know nothing can stop Jason, this FUCKER took it and grinned. Well, not grinned, because IT's got no mouth, right? But it's like IT's body wasn't solid. The bullet splashed through it and popped out the other side. IT finishes off the eye-less Capeli, and, apparently not satisfied, starts in on the others.

So I'm thinking, "Fuck." And then I'm thinking, Fang guy right before, and now an IT that shrugs off bullets and sees without eyes, with supernatural strength that allows him to rip into people and not actually pierce their skins but do massive internal damage--vampire?

Vampire. I don't care how dumb-assed that sounds. If IT's really made of liquid, I'll boil him off with good, clean American fire. I grab a bottle of everclear from E's drink cart, and I realize these bottles are designed to survive being dropped by crack heads trying to cook crystal meth, so throwing it at him isn't going to help. I figure that if I throw it at the ceiling, we'd douse him with the 180 proof, and light him up when he cleared the doorway. Only I miss, and most of it lands on Nunzio Capeli.

Somewhere in all of this, IT picked up a little friend, a Goth asshole with a shotgun who took out Nunzio through the picture window that E just replaced last month. The whole Goth thing makes my vampire theory work better, so I'm running with it. IT stops at the door, and shoves something nasty into Nunzio's pie hole. Furtunately, Nunzio starts vomiting up whatever it was, but I'll keep an eye on him, and make sure he doesn't turn into a vampire.

Right about that time, I realize there's somebody newat the door. I'm going for my holdout piece, hidden where I used to keep the pr0n before I realized I'd need a little more room(s) to store it all, when I realize Terri's come home from the movies.

Fuck. FUCKFUCKFUCK! She's in the line of fire, and in front of her is a GUY whose body seems to allow bullets to pass through him right into her (said GUY having no eyes, mouth, etc.) Thank god she freaked and ran. I know, though, she's run to an old, bad friend, and I won't see her for a while. I don't blame her in this particular instance--I just wish I was there for her, an alternative to her friend. But I'm not.

IT rips the head off of a Capeli, and gets away. Goth boy gets capped by a Capeli. I'm on my knees, trying to keep Nunzio Capeli from dying from the shotgun blast. It's not enough to find the pellets--there's glass from the picture window in there. All the while, I keep thinking, If only I was at the ER, I'd grab the..., and then I realize I can't and I've gotta stop playing the shoulda coulda woulda game. A conversation I had with D comes back to me. I think I might take him up on it.

I keep working on mending Nunzio, and I'm at a critical phase, when we hear sirens. Now we've had cops come visit once or twice, but we've never had corpses on the living room rug and front lawn before. Nunzio slips E a card, and lapses back into unconsciousness. Everyone starts heading for the hills, and I give them the, "Go on without me" speech. If I leave, Nunzio dies, and then there's nowhere we could hide from the wrath that would come. The fuckers I call my friends and family take me up on my offer, and bug out, but fortunately for me, they run like girls, and D, seeing they won't get away in time, apparently tries to lure them away. These are, of course, the worst cops in California, seeing a large African American male in a pimp-purple Escalade as an honors student picking up medicine for his sick cat, apparently. They don't follow. Instead, they enter the home, and I figure we're fucked.

But we're not.

Nunzio muttered something about "hungry cops," but I figured that was a metaphor for cops on the take, who were always willing to look away a little farther when the cash was good, or maybe they were fond of the donuts. Nope. These guys were literally HUNGRY. They relieved us of our crop of corpses (sans the eyeless Capelli), and acted as if we were doing them a favor. Oh, and they asked for a puppy, licking their lips. One of them actually had breath that smelled of foecal matter.

So after they walked out, things settled down a little. Nunzio stabilizes, and I'm fashioning a stake out of an old broom handle--just in case. Z shares some of her new footage, and we see that the fat cop has a mouth like a lamprey, with a ring of sharp teeth and a central maw. Maybe the camera doesn't show reality, but perhaps a metaphorical reality, if that makes any sense. No, probably not.

Malt liquor's making it hard to type.

Z comes clean about her past. She tried to off herself, and instead woke up three days later, with three reels of film shot with her ancient 8mm camera. Each is pretty fucked up, and they point to a child molester with transsexual qualities who either gets beat up by children, or flagellates himself after the act. I'm pretty sure none of this is in the DSM-IV, but I'll check later on. The only real clue we have is that this guy's obsessed with Henry Darger, a fucked up individual in his own right. The one thing I took from the tapes is that I was in one of them, coming back from an...err...appointment. I don't remember seeing anyone who looked like that, but the urge to track down this fuck and find out if the children at the playground are okay is overwhelming.

Need sleep. N and E are discussing making drugs in the corner. Business as usual for these people. God. Me and Terri have GOT to get OUT OF HERE.

Oh, Terri.

Where are you?

In the drive: Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age

Looks like I got my laptop out of hock just in the nick of time...

See, I needed to get something for Terri, it being the anniversary of our engagement and all. I guess a guy's supposed to forget shit like that, but life's too short to let the things that matter slip away. So I headed over to Omar's, and got a quick loan.

Two month's later...

The weird thing is that it's running better than ever. I think Omar rented it out as a loaner, and it came back all souped up, with a whole lotta software added on, and, I kid you not, about twice the capacity it had before. There was also a network card crammed in one of the pockets, and I've been warcasting around Bakersfield, trying to find some unprotected nodes. There's a few, but that means getting out of the house, which I guess is good, but it also means missing time with Terri.

God, what the fuck are we gonna do?

Wow. This is turning out to be the worst pr0n review site EVER, but I need to tell you about this weird shit that just went down. Perhaps a little background is called for:

My name is Darryl (*HI, DARRYL!*), and I used to be a doctor. See, I was finishing my residency, when I ran afoul of a little bureaucratic bullshit. I was kicked to the curb, and just like that, I ended a glorious career as a surgeon before I even began it. Now I'm a telemarketer, but that's not really relevant to what happened. What's relevant is that I'm living with a drug dealer.

Oh, no, not the gangsta kind, who wants to put a cap in yo ass and all. E's the best fucked up father figure a fucked up kid could ask for. He's a chemist of the old school, who believed you could drop a few tabs of acid, and see through time or whatnot. I can't really complain about the morality of what he does, because it's meant food in my belly and a roof over my head ever since I was ten. I try to stay out of his way most of the time, and lend a hand with a few unfortunate OD's. People live their lives before they come to E's, and if they're already fucked up when they pass his threshhold and don't tell him before stepping into the shooting gallery, then that's just really unfortunate. I'm not passing judgement in any direction. E provides a service and does it in a fair and honest manner. I can't fault him for anything.

Well, maybe his choice of clientele leaves a little to be desired. He draws all types, but mostly the college kids and mostly on Friday night. The hustle gets so bustling that he often runs a card game, and sometimes when I have the cash to burn, I sit in. I'm luck's bitch most weeks, but you never know, right?

So last night D, a nice guy as large Black old school mofos go, is hanging around, which is normally a good thing. Fuck, it's a GREAT thing. He always packs, and he knows how to handle himself in a staredown, and sometimes we take his pimpin' ride to Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. E's there, as always, and N, a professor from the college, brought some of his jailbait along, just to make my life hell.

(Well, maybe he didn't bring the girls with him, but they followed his tweedy breadcrumbs right to the domicile, so what's the difference?)

This Black woman, who'd been there a few days before, showed up with a cheap 8mm camera (which is always bad news--hey, little shits with camcorders recording your escapades for Jackass Lite: IT'S CALLED EVIDENCE, you fucking morons!), and that's not cool. In fact, I had a peek into her bag, and saw a VHS tape with "DM" on the spine. DM can stand for a lot of things, but for some reason, I knew it was "Darryl Moody." I'll call her Z for Zapruder, because she has a bad habit of getting shit on tape that calls the official record into question.

And that's what happened, more or less. This Asshole shows up to buy from Emmit, and he has date-rape etched into his DNA, and he's macking on one of N's little moths. I really don't want her to get burned, so me and D step up (actually, D steps up, and I stand twitching in the corner, creeping toward my doctor's bag and the sense of purpose it gives me). Things get tense and a little weird, and Z actually gets the whole thing on tape. Anyways, the asshole makes a break for it, and D decides to put one in his knee. Asshole manages to limp into his car and drive off, against my best efforts. He was a shit, but he looked like he needed some serious medical attention.

While exciting, all of this is secondary to what happened next: Z passes around the footage she's just shot of asshole, and...

Hm. I'm not sure. There's this intense fuzziness surrounding all my memories of that event, like a shot of rohypnol. I mean, I remember what happened with perfect clarity: the guy had fangs growing from his chops! But it was in the film ONLY. I would have remembered the fangs, I think, and he had none to speak of. What's weird is the emotional detatchment I feel about seeing that. I know I would have freaked out if / when I viewed the film, but I don't remember my reaction to it (except a little bit where I got in Z's face about the tape in her purse) at all. I hope E didn't decide to slip me a lil' sumpin. That's the last thing Terri and I need right now.

So we're all arguing about the film and what it means, and how we might have to go after Asshole and see if those teeth are really there, and I'm all for it, because all of a sudden, I can't get his damn bleeding knee out of my head. (D reassures me that he knows someone who makes ballistic matching irrelevant, but I've seen enough CSI to know that prudence dictates getting rid of the gun) Then the goombahs show.

I just realized I've mentioned my name and Terri's, but everyone else's name I've changed to protect the 'innocent'. But there's nothing innocent about the Capellis. Three of them rush a fourth in, and he looked like he was tortured. Compound fracture of the radius and ulna, both eyes brutally removed, and the capper: a length of his small intestine that's extruding from his abdomen, despite no evidence of surgery or trauma that would cause this extrusion. It was as if someone reached through his skin and muscle mass as if it was not there, grabbed a length of intestine, and yanked a coil back through. I cauterized his eyes, stopped the bleeding on the compound fracture and set the arm, and made an incision through which I replaced the coil. Meanwhile, E and D were arguing with the other three Goomers, and Z--stupid, stupid Z--was getting it all on tape.

There's a lot of shit I'm leaving out. Danny, Terri's brother, was in and out this whole time. He lives in his own private idaho most of the time (more like his own private Newark, New Jersey). Danny actually sucker punched the asshole, so kudos to him for that. Terri and Chris, a friend of Terri who works as a 'dancer', stopped by before the Goomers showed. Thankfully, Terri, Chris, and Danny were elsewhere when the THING attacked.

Fuck. My mouth is full of bile. I need to wash it out and get something to drink before I can go on.

Don't worry...it gets worse.