The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

stopped at a petting zoo and, while Jeordie tried to communicate with the chickens, I stared fascinated for a full hour into a giant, mud-covered, pulsating pink pig pussy, not unlike the one I would ride years later in the “Sweet Dreams” video.
    In one of the park’s plastic fantasy worlds, there were a dozen families sitting around picnic tables, happy and content as they gnawed on giant turkey legs. It was a barbaric celebration of carnivorousness given an ironic twist by the fact that there were pigeons and seagulls flying overhead, oblivious to the carnage being perpetrated against their fellow fowl. I’m not a vegetarian, but the whole gleefully brutal spectacle seemed wrong and disgusting. So I walked over to a set of twins who were dressed alike, looking like something out of Children of the Damned . As they sat there tearing at their turkey bones, I stood in front of them, raised my sunglasses to reveal my mismatched eyes, gave them as baneful a grin as I could muster in my state, and pulled out my razor and sliced my arm. I let the blood run off my wrist and drip down onto the discarded ticket stubs and popcorn kernels on the ground. They dropped their meat and ran away screaming as I walked away exhilarated by my success, because there’s nothing like the feeling of knowing that you’ve made a difference in someone’s life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.
    Driving back to Fort Lauderdale the next day, we passed the Reunion Room and, on the same corner where I had seen the car crash, there was a prolife demonstrator, a skeletal, gray-haired man in a short-sleeved work shirt with a wife beater underneath and blue work pants. Every afternoon he marched up and down the block like an old factory worker on strike, but instead of a sign demanding more health benefits his was emblazoned with pictures of aborted fetuses. Anyone who would listen was given a long, loud sermon on how we’re all going to hell for killing the unborn.
    Still flushed with mischief from the day before and looking as hideous, pale and unclean as corpses, we pulled up near him and called him to the car. Excited that maybe he’d actually found someone to discuss his views on damnation with, he approached us. When he was close enough to see through the open window clearly, I held out my hand. “I talked to the devil today, and he told me to tell you hello,” I growled, shooting a fireball in his direction. It burst in his face, and he let out an ungodly scream, threw his sign in the air and ran. I didn’t see him on the corner much after that. But I think I actually did him a favor since he probably became a folk hero at his local church; everyone knows that, like Job, you have to be pretty fucking holy and righteous to merit the devil’s attention.
    Jeordie and I had grown close by then, though he still wasn’t a member of the band. The bond that united us was music, a love of havoc-wreaking and a mutual obsession with old kids toys, particularly Star Wars, Charlie’s Angels and Kiss paraphernalia. I had spoken to Jeordie a few times at the mall, but we first became friends when I was at a concert with Pogo. I was carrying one of the metal lunchboxes from my collection, and Jeordie scampered over and said, “I know someone who has more of those. If you want, I’ll take you to him. He’s got tons of lunchboxes.” We exchanged phone numbers, and the next day he drove me to a store run by a corpulent cutthroat named John Jacobas. It was a paradise of Star Wars figures, Muhammad Ali dolls, rusty wind-up monkeys with clapping cymbals, and, in particular, Nazi World War II paraphernalia, which was probably what he made most of his money from. He just looked at you, assessed the degree of desperation in your eyes and then offered you the highest price he knew you’d accept. He was a professional, and he lured me back to the store every week with the promise that he would bring in his treasure trove of lunchboxes, which, like the end of a rainbow, he was never able to find, if it existed at all.
    Jeordie and I also discovered that we had a crush on the same girl, a hot brunette who looked like the kind of person who should be working at the mall. And, in fact, she did—at the piercing pagoda. But she wouldn’t even acknowledge our humanity, no matter what part of our body we asked her to pierce. So I fell back