Vulgarity for the Masses
By
J.S. Lawhead
Burning
Bulb Publishing
P.O. Box 4721
Bridgeport, WV
26330-4721
www.BurningBulbPublishing.com
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 Burning Bulb Publishing. All rights reserved.
Cover illustrated by Gary Lee Vincent with art by Gustave Doré.
Smashwords edition.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011937186
Dedicated to Jessica Arnold.
Introduction
J.S. Lawhead is a child of the mystic Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee; where magick and logick often collide behind shadows left by the Einherjar, ghosts rise above the waters and mists to further dull the grey air, and the fabric that separates life and death between dreams is camouflaged as the seasonal mountain canopy of nature. It is an excellent environment to foster the concepts in this book and is recommended to all.
He is a practicing Lutheran, lives with a wife and a moderately extended family, dives off the deep end to get shit done and occasionally releases music under the name 12 Followers/Meteo Xavier. Born in 1984 and completely ignorant of his blood type. Is currently confident the reader has all the information he or she needs to know on the subject of J.S. Lawhead.
The Whale Story
Oh, God, no...
Meteo Xavier.
A man whom God had cast out of heaven and hell onto Earth.
A man whose very name inspires fear and mortal bedwetting across the Texas Panhandle.
A man who turns slack-jawed ignorance into atomic genocide.
A man whose very image inspires face-palm in every culture across the divided world.
A man for whom no level of tolerance could ever be held.
A man who has been rotting away at mankind's will to live with bountiful, bouncy dementia since the days of Eisenhower.
A man who has balanced both life and death atop his Macedonian genitals.
A man who was once classified as prime rib striplets by the FDSA as part of a failed peace treaty with Hizbul Mujahedeen.
A man whose thought processes enter space and destroy entire worlds that haven't even been born yet.
A man for whom the laws of nature are simply shitting themselves in fear trying to accommodate.
A man that, for all intents and purposes, should have been killed hundreds of times by now, has been released once again into polite society to start a new adventure!
Today he is going to accomplish something no mentally capable human being would ever try to do.
Ride the rare Blue Whale!
The blue whale, spotted several months ago by scientists of the Northern Pacific Oceanography Consult of Seattle, is the Marlon Brando of the ocean blue - it is elusive, weighs thirty-four tons and has sex with anything in its immediate vicinity. All of the ecosystem below the waves bow down to their king; even the Kraken knows its place in the presence of its sovereign - usually bent over a coral reef with its tentacles pulled back and learning through its rectum why he's called a "sperm" whale. The beast has never been tamed by God or man. In the olden days of yore, the Blue Whale could ingest a full supply ship on its way to Rome and whatever it regurgitated washed up on shore and became cheap housing for beach-dwelling gypsies in southern France and Italy. It could create giant vacuums or hurricanes with its flow of breath and when it would come up to breathe, its lust for life was so great that it would jump hundreds of yards into the air and create tidal waves that would end an entire civilization. It is, after all, historical fact that many of our greatest cities, histories, accomplishments and technologies have all become ocean floor clusterfuck thanks to the mighty prowess of the rare Blue Whale.
The Blue Whale symbolizes all the majesty and horror of the natural world. It is the greatest evolution of existence on the planet. The Darwin Icon. The mightiest beast in all of God's creation!
This is going to be a challenge, but Meteo is an idiot. He is far too ignorant to understand fear or common sense and, thus, the obstacles that would prevent any other man on Earth, even serial killers lost in fantasy, flat-earth society members and 9/11 conspiracy theorists, will have no effect on him in his pursuit to ride the rare Blue Whale!
He took his fastest boat - a downed helicopter with an oil leak through the windshield, carrying anchors for some God-forsaken reason, and scoured the seas to find the beast.
Days went by. Meteo searched miles and miles for hours into weeks only to come up with nothing. Neither a scratch nor a clue, neither a sliver nor hair, nothing even halfway resembling the largest mammal in the galaxy throughout all the ocean. Meteo searched for days still, through heartbreaking nothingness of the sea, through storms and epic god battles with Poseidon himself, through pirates and pilots and Pontius Pilate doing Pilates in a pickle pie pink parka off the Pacific Rim, but nothing brought him closer to his goal. Meteo survived on a steady diet of himself and slept in the spacious four bedroom condominium and mountaintop resort center that was kept in the back of the helicopter for emergencies. He did well enough, but how long could a man survive on self-cannibalism in a four bedroom condo?
Finally, at the crack of dawn one day, after wasting years of taxpayers' money, he spotted the mighty Blue Whale circling the Queen Elizabeth Islands of Antarctica and basking in the glow of its own filth. Meteo took the helm and piloted his vessel slowly and carefully around the backside of the creature so as not to startle it. He crept up close to the beast's starboard abdomen and tossed a hook high into the cavernous blowhole.
Success!
Meteo reared back and ducked down as he prepared for a thrashing reprisal, but there was no reaction from the beast at all. He jerked the rope once. No reaction still... Meteo put both hands on the rope now and strongly jerked it several times with great strain and endless, thankless effort. It was not unlike the hand job he had to give Roger Waters to stop him from making solo albums in a bid to save Montreal (now there's a story with no winner). Still there was no reaction. Perhaps all was well here? Was it resisting fighting back?
Meteo climbed the rope until he reached the top of the beast and made such a clamor that no living thing could possibly ignore. The whale moaned low for a solid minute before pitching its multiple-voice higher up to indicate a playful mood and the positive acceptance of its new guest. The beast was game for a ride! What luck! A mammoth figure with as much hunger for adventure as the great Meteo Xavier! The great and hungry adventurer gracefully removed the hook from his newfound playmate and the two dashed off across the seas! To ride like the wind! To stop for nothing - not even land!
The two came ashore and swam through thick farms and bounced across busy highways parallel to major roads like ping-pong balls all across the continental states of united America. From that inhuman carnage, they crashed through the urban jungles of Boston, Atlanta, Georgia, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Knoxville, Grand Rapids, Dallas, Milwaukee, Munich, Detroit and Chicago. Meteo saddled the whale and threw his hat into the air like a crazed midnight cowboy as he and a large aquatic animal plowed right through the middle of the Sears Tower and brought the entire borough of Chicago down to the flaming caverns of hell underneath it. Not a single survivor had a full cecum or a home to go back to that day, it must be said, and soon it was back to destruction on the high seas as they laid waste to Portland, Oregon, having literally caused them to drown in a shit-storm.
Meteo and his new friend rode for days into weeks. This grand adventure was just what Meteo needed to quit his obsession with Jodie Foster's concave boobs. Ah, he had never felt so free, so happy and so jubilant - especially with such a unique new playmate! Never once in the history of man has the union of beast and blubber been so perfect; the bond between them idyllic and blessed by the living Lord who smiled on them from on high. They shared stories of action, adventure, sexual misconduct and minorities from every generation of contemporary history. They traded recipes and nodes of immediate wisdom brought on by laughter and tears. They both opened up to one another about their joys, beliefs, concerns and fears; as though they were both doctors knowing full well they were just patients. Both shared a mutual respect for the guru Peter Gabriel and love for the Christ Jesus. Immaculate. Some people would say such a relationship could never happen in this modern, go-go world of industry, entertainment and hysterical pregnancy; but, then again, these are the sort of people that touch themselves at night with poison cattle prods watching illegal videos of lizard-tailed, bifurcated Siamese Asian orphans giving Martin Luther King Jr. a lap dance during his assassination. No, these wild mammals were the perfect match for each other. Soul mates, Moiré Te deis (which is poor French for a pregnant nun) and, thus, buddies.
But after a week of bonding and illegal medical practitioning, the beast stopped very short and very, very suddenly; throwing Meteo off into the deep blue like Meteo thrown off a blue whale into the deep blue like Meteo thrown off a deep blue whale into the blue. He hit head first with a viewtiful splash into the arctic sea of ice and, while getting only mildly damp, he cursed the beast with words not suited for this world. As the beast was stunned and seemingly shocked by something, whatever loose and random synapses formed the makeshift central nervous system in Meteo Xavier's dick compiled and concluded that something was wrong. He apologized to his new best friend in the entire world and decided to find out why the beast had stopped so abruptly.
Meteo sunk down into the cold, dry waters under the whale until he came to the source of the beast's sudden vexation and, to his disgust, discovered the problem.
The whale had, at some point as they drew near to the area, been immediately sexually assaulted... with a chainsaw.
So the beast is female, Meteo thought. That would explain why she just wouldn't shut the fuck up about tampons already. Hoarding blood-soaked cunt sponges was one thing, but this was no time to think about breakfast. The very idea of a whale mating with an inexplicably placed and rusted chainsaw sent shivers down an already frozen spine - suppose this item carried with it some sort of genetic code meant to spawn repercussions of itself inside the doomed womb of the innocent?
Imagine... a cross-breed of chainsaw whales... destroying the aquatic atmosphere without prejudice; making the swordfish look like an impotent bitch; uprooting and devouring harbors with the simple erection; penis torpedoes raining havoc on Pearl Harbor; evaporating the vampire race as we know it! Ending the golden age of Web 2.0 and ushering in the dark age of Web 3.0! Good God! The Blue Whale was a dangerous fellow already, but this would be an eldritch apocalypse - a satyr play written by the masturbating chimerical fusion of John Waters, Richard Elfman, Ingrid Newkirk, David Murray Brockie, Lily Braun, Georg Christoph Licthenberg, Leroy Jenkins, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Bugs Bunny and Justin Bieber. The image the human mind would associate with that alone is enough to earn humanity the righteous, fatal ass-pounding it is now dangerously close to receiving. Sweet Judas, this must stop immediately!
Meteo took it upon himself to remove the device and save mankind from another potential disaster showcasing a dumb animal mating with a power tool. With the frozen waters solidifying vaginal lips (thank you, Jonathan), Meteo put both hands on the offending industrial effigy and pulled with all his might. He pulled and pulled - until Hercules wept in pain just watching the daffy do-gooder pop every muscle in his body in competition with the laws of nature and coital engineering logistics. This is was not unlike the hand job Meteo had to perform on Roger Waters (so many babies died... yet he unfortunately survived). He would not let that happen again! Meteo pulled like fourteen horses in heat and slowly the chainsaw was exiting its self-invited party. More and more... c'mon, Meteo, you can do it!
Success!
The foul instrument was removed safely and securely. What an enormous relief! The people of the world could exhale their bated breath knowing apocalypse had been delayed once again thanks to the mindless, indescribable efforts of young Meteo Xavier! He took the chainsaw in hand and surfaced to continue the ride...
Until he caught in his sight three hundred Coast Guard agents who had appeared, seemingly out of the blue and armed with guns, knives and launchers of all kinds, surrounding him for arrest.
Surfacing with chainsaw in hand left little to their imaginations as to what he could be guilty of, and, well, no bible verse he could throw at them could stop them from hauling his ass to jail straight from the ocean. There he would spend the night in a cell with a transsexual hooker of whose original gender and subsequent transformation were impossible to ascertain.
The next morning, after an uncomfortable scenario generously referred to as The Crying Game Parts II and III, Meteo was rolled up and packaged into a tube of toothpaste and transported across the desert to District Court.
The most feared of all courts.
Meteo heard stories of this place; often with ejaculatory endings and bridges and all of them could curl a man's teeth into fingernails and paint those fingernails with a pasty concoction of blood, feces, and cholesterol. This was a place where Murphy's Law was a living being of fangs and skin and blood so hot it could freeze molten lava in our sensitive plane of existence. It was a monster beyond all monsters and its jaws sweated at the savory image of clamping down on Meteo Xavier's private parts until the end of time. Meteo's fate was in jeopardy; not for the first time, but almost definitely for the last.
Despite all that, Meteo was not going to give in to bizarre circumstantial occurrences. He was going to fight the system tooth and nail, like a ten-foot-long Bruce Lee, until the system, in his words, "[...] got down on its knees and gave me a Missouri rim job..." and by that, he means the system will beg for forgiveness.
Armed with a stunning, sharp blue suit that was passed down to every man in the family, starting with the patriarch, Abraham, the man who fathered many nations despite constant promises that those nations were on the pill, a cunning sadistic attitude (Abraham again), and the kind of animal magnetism that make men infertile and women explode into pregnancy by the mere twitching of his lustful brow (from his mother), he was ready to take on his next greatest challenge:
The District Judge.
The Honorable Marshall Anus.
A being of unfathomable girth and evil, Anus would have had the power to condemn the devil himself if the devil wasn't the Judge’s personal au pair and German-bred sex slave. He was a fearsome demon; a godless blob of rotting flesh that made Jabba the Hut look like Tim Burton. No man, woman or God had ever crossed Marshall Anus and lived to tell about it. The Honorable Judge, rumored to be the hell spawn from the world's only sodomic pregnancy (another inadvertent reference to Roger Waters), does not kill his victims; preferring them instead to live and spend each of their wretched, crestfallen hours wishing for sweet, disfiguring, horrible all-purpose death; rendering mortality infinitely soaked in woe. The Honorable Judge sends people to the darkest depths of their souls the way most men expel a bodily fluid into the pretty face of the prom queen. He takes his razor-sharp fingers, grabs both sides of your penis (or mangina, as it were) and tears it open like a slice of bread to turn you inside out so that your inner darkness would scald the sewn flesh of your body while the sinews would burn and flap against what's left of your skin like flaming whips on a helicopter rotation piloted by Satan's yeast infection.
Amen.
Ordinary criminals, when confronted with the task of judicial appraisal with this megalithic crone, often take their own lives knowing the alternative is far, far worse. The honorable, almighty, everlasting blight of the Judge has butchered, slaughtered, and processed criminals of royal and commoner blood into food for the denizens of Hell for thousands of years... and now the legendary Meteo Xavier was next. What cruelty is the cumstain of fate!
But Meteo Xavier is no ordinary man; he is, as was stated before, an idiot, and unable to be restricted by fear, apprehension, or any kind of cumbersome thought producing mentality ever recorded in psychological science. Meteo had conflicted with incredible evil before and every single time had come out on top; from the Pygmy Yetis to the Electrophile Pigeons; from the possessed Hitler Cow to the bowel hungry Rasputin Worm; Roger Waters, Elton John, Bob Geldof, Chet Atkins, Garth Brooks and his pansy alterna-clone Chris Gaines, Trent Reznor, Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason, Horatio Sanz, whoever the hell that guy is that plays the drums for U2... no evil has ever been too great for Meteo Xavier to overcome. If he could take out Freddie Mercury and convince the world he was not assassinated for secretly using his rock personality to fund communist terrorism in China and the U.S.S.R2, then certainly this was possible to get through.
This was going to be a clash of the Titans and who would win?
Playboy protagonist or antichrist antagonist?
****
When the sun rose the next morning... it actually didn't. It was 10:00 AM the next morning when Meteo was escorted via Aquafresh to the courtroom and it was still night outside. This was not a good sign, but Meteo stayed vigilant. As the trial to end all trials began, he waited patiently in the tiny little defendant box while millions watched from the stands of the district court room. Millions more observed from the supposed safety of their television as camera crews from every corner of the world, including Uganda which had just now discovered the concept of "video", set up innumerate press tables and coverage space to capture every moment of what would very well be the last moments of recorded time. The press was releasing up to minute news for the controversy-hungry public who, by this point, had stayed up late at night masturbating to the dream of Meteo Xavier being removed from the Book of Life once and for all. A lifetime of eternal darkness was an easy choice compared to a world full of Meteo Xavier. This was the day they had waited for for years and years. It was finally going to happen.
Meteo stood tall, defiant and confident, but even he still felt the sting of fear and sexual repression.
Clang!
Meteo's pants were soaked upon that disturbance. It was the funeral bell and it was the announcing sound that the District Court Judge had arrived.
Just then, a cloud of black smoke filled the air and the foulest smell to ever pervade the senses overwhelmed the audience. The stench made an outline and soon filled with color, or whatever one could call it, until a form could be reached. This form then expanded outward into the third dimension the same way the Huns expanded their reach from Germany to the Ural River and the Baltic Sea, with eerily similar consequences, and gave rueful shape to deeply unpleasant form. Marshall Anus was here and he was going to begin.
The two combatants were now ready to square off.
"Meteo Xavier!" The judge shouted with all his might; commanding him and the entire audience to stand up in his reverence. The Judge also stood up and towered over even the building itself like the forgotten prototype of Cthulu he was. "Today is the last day of your miserable life! Today, the people of the Earth sleep soundly knowing that the disease that plagues and destroys society will be brought to justice. Today, everything that there ever was about you comes to a screeching halt over your sun-baked carcass! You are a profane individual, Meteo Xavier; a filthy heathen of gastronomical proportions that the stars themselves refuse to align in their recognition of you! Your contributions to the suffering and demise of humanity will not be tolerated any further and I will see to it, sir, that you never receive positive stimulus as long as you exist; which I will additionally see to will forever be. Have you anything to say in your defense before we begin?"
Meteo stood up; his sharp blue suit cutting through the spectrum of light like a hot jizz laser on some old woman's hot dog.
"Strange as it may sound, you bastard son of a goat," He said slowly, surely and confidently, "but you said every word in perfect sequence of what it was I was going to say to you, you intumescent sack of shit. As far as my defense is concerned..." Meteo then turned around, pulled down his pants, bent over so all the world could see inside his alveolated posterior and mooned the judge while whistling "God Bless America" through his tone-deaf rectum.
"Care to sing along, Judge?"
He would not. The Judge was furious and the audience was beyond astounded at the incredible display of defiance. Anus quickly tried to regain himself and continue the trial.
"Where is your defense attorney!?" screamed the Judge Anus, as though he were preaching to deaf sinners.
Meteo responded without fear, "I will represent my own defense."
The judge erupted in laughter and the scared flock of sheep that represented an audience followed suit. "They say a man who represents himself has a fool for a client!"
Meteo spat in the judge's general direction; hitting the cute lady who does the typing and thus impregnating her. That was his response.
The Judge grimaced and shouted with all his might: "Where is the prosecutor!?"
"M'lud....." started Meteo; raising an eyebrow to the aging fart. "I shall also act as my own prosecutor!"
The courtroom exploded into activity upon those words. Women fainted and went right into labor as flames burst from their birth canals into the streets for all to swallow unto their journeys through the river Styx. The scorching placentas that leaked out from there formed a political party near the jury box and marched on the streets of Washington confusing and then converting hundreds of people. The Judge himself looked like he was about to have a baby right there on the courtroom floor.
"Are you serious?" the words crept out of the Judge's lips.
Meteo nodded. "Read me my charges, impotent pedophile!"
While the audience moaned and winced collectively in pain, the judge smiled, farted gasoline, and prepared to do exactly that.
"Very well! Let it be known, Meteo Xavier, that you are charged with the following heinous acts:
* Illegal activity involving endangered animals.
* Use of an illegal and dangerous device.
* Blatant disregard for safety; your safety and the safety of the whale.
* Obstruction of justice.
* Satire of justice.
* Harassment of justice.
* Harassment towards inanimate objects.
* Petty larceny.
* Petty homicide.
* Pretty homicide.
* Ugly homicide.
* Impersonating a police officer.
* Impersonating a prostitute and then impersonating the two involved in public sexual activity with a senior official.
* Impersonating inanimate objects.
* Petty prostitution.
* Pretty prostitution.
* Ugly prostitution.
* Assaulting a police officer..."
Meteo interrupted, "Your Honor, if you can even be called that, the police officer I assaulted was in fact me as I was impersonating a police officer, as I impersonated the prostitute, and then proceeded to impersonate both figures at the same time as we were sexually involved with the senior official; of whom I was also impersonating."
The courtroom groaned in unison and the judge continued on secretly hoping God would interfere and strike Meteo down.
*...assaulting a district prostitute.
* Driving a commercial airplane without a license.
* Assaulting a commercial airplane.
* Assaulting a commercial airplane with a district prostitute.
* Possession of underage firearms.
* Possession of mind-altering documents.
* Abusing your right to incriminate yourself at every single fucking opportunity.
* Illegal U-turns on the roof of the Parthenon.
* $34,509 in traffic violations.
* Reckless jogging.
"You don't own a single valid I.D. or proof of American citizenship and we found what you keep in your sock drawer...!" He removed his glasses and spit a black substance from his mouth, "How you kept from spontaneously exploding by the heat of your sins is a question mankind will never answer."
"Well, we don't know why a fat fucker like you won't just give up and die in the face of someone as gorgeous and suave as I am... so let’s keep it at that!"
Again the courtroom groaned at Meteo's insane defiance of forces no man could comprehend and many died in shame.
So the trial went on; Meteo defending and prosecuting himself for weeks and weeks on end while spectators wept in sorrow. He produced and refuted evidential item after evidential item - including those that would have solved other cases which he then destroyed inside the crotch of his pants. He acted as his own witness which lead him to badger said witness and forced him to cry before he invited himself for drinks and sex after the proceedings for the day; of which Meteo then threatened to sue and used the entire court as a witness who he then forced to sign witness testimony papers and waivers for future car insurance purchases. The jury was so confused they didn't know what to think and many left sighting uncontrollable bowel movements and generative death resulting directly from Meteo Xavier - which was nothing compared to the effects the trial and his behavior were having on the world at large as people left and right were breaking their mouths like fine porcelain china from their jaws hitting the floor every hour of every day. For every idiotic, naked pelvic gesture Meteo Xavier thrust onto the cameras to illustrate his innocence, stock prices fell through the roof, gas prices tripled instantaneously and people drove themselves off bridges. Levees broke and the flood waters came in to drown the cities of America for his irreverence. For every stupid, fake Spanish sentence that came out of the defendant's mouth, an angel lost its wings, shaved a kitten with scissors, and stuck it up the butt of a passerby. The rate of people in the world who suffered from rectal feline molestation jumped from 1% to 88% overnight. Whole kingdoms fell in the wake of Meteo Xavier's defensive-prosecutive process.
The Judge was livid as hell and tried every vile thing known to God to annihilate every atom of his annoying, annoying, annoying defendant and all to no avail. Finally, as things looked grim for Meteo, he was able to bring up the Killer Whale Preservation Act of 1984 and threw the courtroom into a mad circus of stupor fury.
"Enough of this!" screamed the judge as fountains of human waste poured from his mouth, "What the fuck is the meaning of this!? What do you hope to accomplish with this unending wormhole coda of absurdity!?"
"I am going to prove myself innocent, you whore!"
Meteo's brash attitude had sent Marshall Anus over the edge.
"Who are you to be so bold!?" screamed a frantic District Judge.
Meteo stamped his foot on the ground and looked the Judge square in the eye. "I am Meteo Xavier!" he shouted back. "I wear bold like a condom!"
And with those words, the most defiant words a man could ever scream in the face of such evil, Meteo Xavier had done that which even now was still unthinkable.
That was it.
That was the final straw.
The earth cracked open and released that which is unspeakable from the flames of Hell onto the living Earth and every man, woman and child who dared to be born. The Judge's head turned black and started screaming and screaming until it levitated off his neck and began spinning wildly with the sonic disturbance of his voice eradicating solid material objects and people for miles around. The lights illuminating the structure began flickering wildly and forming vague silhouettes of spirits and damned souls on the ceiling. Rivers of blood poured from the walls of the courtroom while the desperate audience sacrificed themselves to God in hopes of escaping the cataclysmic horror. No such luck. It was supernal martial law now. Panic-stricken citizens filled the streets engaging in mass love-making and oily, droopy orgy with whoever and whatever warm body they were lying on top of and running for their lives as chaos reigned high. Whole cities disintegrated in the flash of unholy light, and when the eye blinked, there was nothing left.
There it was, Meteo. The end of the rainbow. The death of the Mana Tree. It was the death of civilization as we knew it.
At the brief pause in time before the events recorded above and the events described below, Meteo was able to rekindle his youth in great melancholy detail. He remembered, as a boy, wondering how he was going to die; always hoping it would be while saving the world from evil or something heroic just as his father and grandfather did before him... It was Meteo's dream to fall with the paladin lineage that his family always lived by. He was never going to die as long as there was evil in the world.
That was his dream.
But Meteo had to face the music now. His paladin lineage was about to be cut short due to an Anus. It was a sad way to go... and he could do nothing but his best and pray to God for forgiveness. Meteo was a man and he had to face death like one.
"Meteo Xavier!" said the Judge, literally fucking with rage. "I am ready to pass judgment! In the thousands of years I have put stained individuals like yourself away, never have I seen anything like you. You have plagued, ridiculed and sexually molested the things that build a good, proper society for much, much, much, much too long! You are the decay of mankind, Meteo; a senseless dung beetle that wallows in filth while you destroy the backbone of the things holding humanity together: ethics, morals... common sense! Nothing is safe from your corruption and now you will be punished! Hell is not good enough for you, but it’s all we can hope for! You are looking into a saaaaaaaaaaaaaaad future, you little bastard!"
Meteo hung his head in defeat and waited for the sentence to be read.
"For the good of people everywhere; for need to heal society; for the command of God to rid the evil of this world... Meteo Xavier, I hereby sentence you to....."
And just then, the walls of the courtroom burst down and the few remaining survivors watched in horrific disbelief as the Blue Whale herself broke through the courtroom walls in its ultimate triumph of nature against man. Despite being thousands of miles from a body of water that can sustain the largest animal on Earth, she was enraged at the sight of her friend being tortured by the system... and now there would be blood to pay!
"Kill that whale!" screamed the Judge, but then the beast rushed forward and no guard, after the horrors they experienced in this court, would dare tempt their luck fighting a whale. The Blue Whale stood up, a half-mile tall into the air, and now it was the judge that was being towered over. As she glowered down at the foul Judge, it became clear that no matter how girthsome and loathsome he was, no beast of Earth or Hell was a match for the Blue Whale. Marshall Anus had been killing people for hundreds of years... the Blue Whale had been eradicating man for thousands. She was a fucking force of nature and even evil was subject to nature!
As the crumbling, crumpled world watched on TV or right in front of them, as it were, they gasped as they watched the Blue Whale's vaginal canal open wide like the doors of doom colliding with stars across the galaxy and devoured the subjected beast in an unprecedented carnivorous carnality. The District Judge Marshall Anus screamed his last as the behemoth of the ocean came down on him and absorbed him like a human tampon. Moiré Te Deis. Ashes to ashes... Anus to dust.
Immaculate.
The Blue Whale jumped off toward the ocean with Meteo Xavier waving goodbye in the increasing distance to the new horizon appearing from the former penumbra of darkness that was lifting with Marshall Anus' influence leaving the world. "Farewell, my good friend!" Meteo called as he dropped his arm and looked around him in the carnage that was once a planet he called home. He picked up the jacket part of his sharp blue suit, smiled at the shared victory between two best friends across borders and headed toward the door - which was now understood to be a giant gaping hole in what used to be a wall caked with blood and marrow.
"That was pretty bold, Meteo..." said one of the bodies just before it died.
"Yep..." Meteo smiled at him. "Bold like a condom, baby..."
The body smiled back and passed shortly after that. Meteo made the sign of the cross on his forehead, said a short a prayer, and continued on his way back home.
On a Sunday Afternoon - This Happened
It was 1:32 PM on a Sunday afternoon, in the Summer of 1987, in the year of our Lord, 2009 Anno Domini, when professional elementary school dropout and teacher Mr. A. F. Packard McDonough walked toward the First United Methodist Bank on Asstits Avenue with a brown leather-bound briefcase in both hands and dressed in the finest threads that a meth-addict on speed could find in the middle of the road. His name was something he invented on the ride over; his real name having been sold for drug money the week before. The week before that he had run into trouble with an old friend and mentor who ran the drug cartels of the Northern Hemisphere - having blown through enough blow to literally shit bricks of cocaine that were supposed to be headed to the inner circles and distributions of Thailand did not sit well with said mentor. "A colon with a street value of $874,000..." he explained, "...is worth quite a bit more than that on the black market, I can assure you. So if you don't get me the money you owe me, motherfucker, I'll be taking that instead. Whatever's left over will be used to pay my boy Jules here to beat your colon-less, bloodied ass all over your daddy's grave. Now quit humping that reindeer and get your fucking ass out on the street! Now!"
A colon-less ass is never any man's destiny, and the two weeks the recently affirmed A. F. Packard had to come up with the money was spent tripping to the sounds of Timothy Leary singing Dark Side of the Moon to a congregation of headless children on a field trip to the Stretch Armstrong Nazi Museum of Shangri-La, North Dakota. There were all kinds of colors and lights and music and fun and talking double-insects and naked proselytizing, but unfortunately all the money he won in the Smurf lottery during a bender inside a psilocybin lab at John Hopkins was immaterial because of his tax status and because none of it was really real. Sunday was the last day to recover real money. Sunday was going to be a seismic event in his history; sharply dividing everything that came before and everything that will come after with a jagged, black, colon-shaped scar.
This had to work, dammit!
"I'm not pooping through a machine!" he screamed until he realized all the people he was talking to were just acid flashbacks that had nothing to offer him in the real world.
The stairs were the first issue for this opiate-addict on crack. "Why were there so many damn steps!? What kind of a bank is this!?" he thought he screamed but actually never made the sounds to produce words, "There's one... two... three... four... five... six!? Who the hell builds six steps in America!? No wonder the stock market's plugging up the toilets, there's too many fuckin' steps everywhere! God Bless America, how are people supposed to get anywhere with their money when there's just so many damn steps everywhere!? Oh, sweet Lord, I think I saw a seventh step! Shit! I'm in over my head! I'm drowning! Help!" He tried in vain to accomplish the pernicious spire of the seventh step, but instead his knees turned to sand and he fell down, down, down... deep into the desert that was born of his crumbled knee cap.
And from there he wandered for forty years through the silent desert of eternal death. The Hebrews that had followed him all perished cursing his name and now it was his turn to do the same. "Water..." he choked out."Water! Water!" and he collapsed in the desert dune with a buzzard nipping at his ass. The sun bore down hard on him and only the cactus would be able to mourn this poor boy and mark his grave. The rest would soon be collected by the buzzards and the sand leeches if the coming hurricanes didn't erode his miserable corpse first.
"Waterrrrrrrrrrrr..." he choked out once more before he passed out forever in the Sahara.
Wendy, the loan officer, whose desk was facing the glass door, motioned for her boss to come forward.
"Keith, there's an alcoholic on the rag outside who just dove headfirst into the koi pond. Should I call the police?"
The man who called himself Keith, but was actually an assumed identity to hide his multiple sex offender status, rubbed his hairless chin and threaded his beard for a minute before answering her. He was actually just undressing her with his eyes and dreaming about making an erotic, body-sized club sandwich out of her zooming, buxom figure, but eventually just said, "Nah, it's Sunday, the police station isn't open. Just let me handle this," so he'd have a reason to leave before she noticed his boner. Keith, a boy in his mid-50s with silver hair and a fair brown suit that all executives with his confidence and swagger obtain at gold-level management with the parent company at Our Savior Lutheran Savings and Loan LLC, strode proud as a toad to take this young dipshit's money on such a fine day. Sunday business he could write off in this district's financial regulations and could therefore easily embezzle into secret grocery bills filled with mysterious giant, human-sized sandwich items. He opened the door gingerly, as he was a ginger, and prepared to coach the man to save himself from self-drowning.
"Y'alright there, young man?"
And the boy with the briefcase splashed up from the depths of oblivion.
"He's alive! Yay!" Keith clapped.
"Ohhh, I'm sorry man... I dreamt I was lost in the tundra... and I was visiting Santa Claus... in the North Pole... He was going to sell me a dime bag of red ochre corridor and green leaf ganja that's put together for a Christmas motif... and you... you... smoke it through a candy-cane..."
"That's perfectly fine. Is there something I can help you with?"
"Yeah, man, I need to get to the bank... can you give me a ride?"
Keith's smile did not diminish; he simply cocked his head to the right, used the minimal requirement of motions to open the door and swung his free hand to make the ushering sign of "go on it."
"Here we are!"
"Ahh, thanks man!" the dumb fuck actually walked forward and somehow fell back into the koi pond again. "Blah! Hey, I appreciate that, man. Hey, I never forget a favor, man. If you ever want to hang out some time; smoke some bud or shit, just call me up man." He continued to struggle with his feet underwater. "I don't have a phone right now, but just call me up. They know me down there, man. They'll tell you how to get a hold of me... arggh!"
Somewhere in the neighborhood of five minutes later, the soaking boy that was now more water than man splashed his way through the door and to the cashier's table, which he mistook as the world's biggest brownie, and started to eat it. Blood and teeth and woodchips flew like the Kentucky County Fair, and when he was done he stood up on his hind legs and let out a fiendish howl to the moon. He had a blank stare in his eyes; so much so that the cashier, Kristin, wondered if he was blind... at least until he opened his mouth again.
"...you got booooobbbbbbsssss..."
"Thank you, sir, I agree. What can we help you with today?" she said with a chirpy voice.
"Uhhh... My name is Skibby-Z. I'm O.G., yo. I got boys all over the city and hoes all over the world. I'm up east from the wess-cy-yeed. I used to be with the Bloods and I once gave a man a buck-fifty because he wouldn't give me a buck-fifty. I'm street, yo. Hardcore motherfucker. I got so many baby mamas, I'm a baby grand pappy. Yea. I'm so good-looking, I got arrested in Wisconsin... for being sexy! Unh~! Yeah, you let me work my business, baby. I'll be riding you like John Wayne into the sunset, bitch. I'm wiggity-wiggity wack like that. Word..." and then he threw up a collection of bent fingers which was supposed to be a gang sign but looked more like he was making arthritis shadow puppet kitty cats.
"I believe you. What can I do for you today?" she said; completely ignoring his soliloquy.
Skibby-Z continued to move his mouth like he was talking, but nothing came out except for a vaporous form that smelled like the inside of a car crash. Then he stopped moving his mouth thanks to pharmaceutically-inclined partial paralysis and hung over the cashier's desk with an immobile stare. He was like a wind-up doll that needed some additional twisting.
He didn't move for three whole minutes.
"Did you want to make a deposit?"
"...huh? Oh... uhhh... uhh... no."
"Ok, did you want to withdraw some cash?"
"...yeah."
"Good. Do you have an account with us?"
"...nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo..." and some drool, which was at least 89% rubbing alcohol and baby laxative, poured out of his mouth like syrup on pancakes; except syrup doesn't usually drag one or two molars with it on the way down.
"Ok. Would you like to start an account with us?"
"I... I want to take some money out."
"Ok. Do you have an account with us?"
"Yeah... no, wait, I mean no..."
"Ok, Mr. Z. So what can I do for you?" she smiled and flashed her pearly, white teeth as all bank tellers are trained to do under penalty of federal indictment.
"Uhhh..." he thought for a second and nothing came to mind. All his knowledge and mastery of the English language that he had pieced together over the last few months went right out the door. Then he pulled out some paper and started jotting something with the pen. When finished, he stuck it out in her face with a huge sweaty palm soaking it into a transparent mess.
"Just do this..."
Kristin took the yellow scratch paper, which simply was scrawled "gimme some money", and examined it thoroughly.
"...I see. Mr. Z, are you trying to rob us?"
"No... wait... no, I mean, yes."
"Ok, well, we don't do that at this bank." She said and sat back in her chair, smiling those bright, pearly whites and flashing her eyes like an epileptic chipmunk.
"You don't?"
"No sir, we just handle checking deposits and withdrawals, mortgage lending, savings, CDs, retirement accounts - that kinda stuff, we don't do anything like that."
"Oh really? Shit, I'm sorry. Ummm... you know any banks in town that will?"
"Oohhh... umm... today's Sunday... umm... tsssssss... nope, I don't think anyone around does that. You might want to go to Christ Baptist National Bank, that's over in Sylvan on I-39."
"Ok, are they open today, do you think?"
"They should be. It's Sunday."
"Ok, cool, thanks, tits." and he reached over the counter to stick his tongue in her mouth. He fell flat on his damn face because his swollen depth perception forgot he was actually twenty feet away from her. After that, he dashed out the door and completely broke his nose as it was not yet opened to allow passage. He then survived another death-defying trip into the koi pond. When Skibby was able to dry himself off, he grabbed and assembled his nuts to get ready to take on Christ Baptist National Bank on I-39.
"But how would I get there?" he asked. He had no car. He had gotten a ride in a car with a stranger who had no face, no legs, and no car. He said his name was the inverse square root of like I give a fuck and he was a Scientologist from Utah. He is likely not coming back.
"Oh, great Djinn, master of time and space... come to me in my time of aid!"
The great Djinn of the Eastern Sphere materialized instantly. He was a tall Persian of the utmost rotund facilities; a quadrilateral head crowned with a turban made from the skin of King Kamehameha V, a vest that pretty much invented every Middle-Eastern stereotype throughout history, pointed shoes that no conventional feet could possibly taper off to, and slacks from Dockers - brand new and still pressed.
"What is it, son of Man? Has mortal life finally quenched thy thirst to turn on this planet? Art thou prepared to vex thy sting in favor of eternal respite?"
"I need a ride to Sylvan on I-39..."
The Djinn was most displeased. Being the immortal zenith of power for this solar system, his power, as he constantly reminded young Skibby, was not to be used for trifles. Rides across town, tickets to Cypress Hill, and unpregnating women from his venomous seed were not acceptable uses of his unending influence on the universe.
"...son of Man, I am immortality incarnate and even I grow deathly ill of thy shenanigans. If thou seekest to impugn the course of fate on this planet so as to tread on the hallowed grounds of I-39, I shall decree the course set before thou though I fear it will lead to an earnest and ignorant death. A point of space may be folded or, more accurately, bent to thy will if the universe recognizes your power and influence of being. By super-exceeding the kinetic energy of your life force, space may to thy will be bent or likely crush you if your intent is ill. The universe has no forgiveness for beings manipulating its force to selfish quests of glory. Well, son of Man? What say you? Canst thou accomplish this foolish crusade?"
"Psssh..." said the irreverent Skibby and, before the mighty Djinn could respond, the boy lifted his sleeves and shoes and hair follicles and skin folds and nostrils until, there in the midst of the immortal's infinite vision, eyes widened in terror for the first time as an entire Persian desert of cocaine fell in a googolplex of flakes upon the pavement. The Djinn's immaculate vocabulary, for the first time, failed to draw up words as he watched this man snort the entire desert in mere minutes.
The mortal stood up high, elevated off the ground, with sparks shooting from his cocaine-infused white aura. The "light" cresting from his nuclear fusion of life and death tore the universe a new asshole and Skibby, now the youngest god in creation, climbed right up in there as all gods eventually do. C'est la vie.
The Djinn stood motionless as the events before him shook his very foundation; the same foundation that the world sits on.
"...the universe has gone mad..." he said silently and faded back to his realm.
Elsewhere, the once divine Skibby Z, having traded his godhood in betwixt dimensions to arrive at this point (and a six-pack of acid) at the Christ Baptist National Bank, fell dick-first onto the hard, sun-scorched asphalt of their parking lot. With his suitcase in hand, he charged inside and demanded attention.
"Everybody listen the fuck up!" He screamed at the top of his lungs; waving his briefcase like a madman. "Everybody down on the ground! Get your hands over your head..."
And he stopped. Everyone was already down on the ground; cowering in fear with hands exactly where he instructed them to be. Skibby looked around and saw many bodies flattened to tile and holding their heads as their tear ducts and bowels could no longer contain themselves and painted the floors a brand new and thoroughly unnecessary series of colors. There was only one person standing and it was a figure all in black, holding a gun, and looking at him in bewildered confusion.
It didn't take a stoned fucking idiot to read between the lines on this one...
"Oh shit..." and he ducked for cover as the man opened fire on him. There were six gunshots fired as Skibby scrambled for cover under a series of mahogany desks. After two more shots barely dented the thick, heavy desk, Skibby dashed for a smaller desk of thinner wood. The gunman fired four more shots, some of which dented the desk heavily but still failed to penetrate. Still, bank employees watched, baffled, as the grown man squealed like a tiny piglet feasting on its afterbirth and zipped to an even smaller desk made of imitation wood that did not cover him completely or protect him at all from the gunman's three additional shots. Finally he dashed again, dragging his butt like a dog and came to a good old-fashioned card table made of good old-fashioned thin plastic and called it good from there.
"Stay back!" Skibby shouted. "I gotta bomb in the briefcase!"
"What!?" shouted the gunman.
"I gotta bomb in the briefcase so back the fuck up!" he held the briefcase closer; preparing to use it. Also, for no decent, conceivable reason whatsoever, he took all six tablets of acid in one shot.
"A bomb? Man, what the fuck are you doing?" He fired three more shots into the table. "There're innocent people in here! They're scared out of their minds! You don't bring a bomb to the bank - you could get arrested!" And he fired several more rounds into the card table; many of which penetrated the table and bounced off the floor to hit people in the leg or the eye. "People could get hurt! It's not safe." And he fired his final bullet which came dangerously close to Skibby's spine.
The boy was in trouble. The gunman was reloading and he needed to focus and come up with a plan, but he was too busy watching his body melt into a puddle of crap and form itself into a candle with all the colors of the rainbow puking on him. Then they took the vomit and turned them into stairs so they could build a stairway to heaven.
"Stairs... why is it always stairs...?" he mumbled.
"What did you say, muthafucka?" he fired twice more after quickly reloading. "Something about stairs?" Bang, bang. "Bitch, you better not be disrespecting stairs. My father builds stairs!" Bang. bang. "He's a volunteer building contractor for victims of land mines! Stairs are what America is all about!" Bang, bang, bang.
"What should I do?" Skibby asked.
"Hang on, brotha, I got an idea." said the oil painting, tie-dyed land shark with sunglasses swimming at his feet. "Just stay here and you'll know when it's safe to come out." And the land shark submerged itself under the tile floor.
Skibby had no idea what to expect; the last time a land shark had promised him help, he found himself in a jar of pickled pigs feet sharing a bed with Stanley Milligram. Milligram swore revenge against Skibby - is this what was going to happen? What to do now? Would Milligram exact his reprisal for being tricked into intercourse with the Hadron Collider?
"Where'd you go, fuckface?" screamed the gunman as he prepared a rocket-propelled satellite missile. "You still dissin' stairs? Boy, when I get my hands on you, I'm going to stomp your ass with my steel-toed boots and then you and I are going to be walkin' up and down the stairs! I'm going to teach you respect for America! We're going to go to my dad's house; a whole fucking house of stairs! There'll be one... two... three... four... five... six stairs! Six sta..."
Then there was silence. Seconds later, there was a sudden explosion of sounds where screaming, gnashing of teeth, guns going off, chomping and mariachi music all combined for a sickening symphony sting of noise. Skibby slowly came up from behind the table to find the gunman replaced by 120 sq. ft. of miscellaneous entrails and some bloodied shoes.
The herd slowly rising to their positions, but still spooked, Skibby jumped up and ran to the cashier counter; which took several tries because, as far as his body knew, he was swimming in a silver lake of feeling overlooking a gnome village while the moon was trying to suck itself off.
And just for fun, he fell into another koi pond...
"Alright, give me all the money in the bank! I gotta bomb in the briefcase and I'm not afraid to use it!" and he quickly undid all the snaps to the briefcase to showcase his weapon of choice.
The teller's eyes, cautious and scared, slowly made the motions to peer inside, and instead of crisis and further urination of her grandmother's antique pantaloons, her eyes went from terrified to that same look of bewilderment that pretty much everyone Skibby has ever met has given him.
"Sir, this isn't a bomb... it's a bong..."
Skibby looked inside and sure enough, it was old Chongo Bongo lying in the case; soaked in the residuum of brain-eating sludge and green leafy shit with dusty fingerprints adorning the proud neck of the bottle and threatening no one.
"Oh, hey, Chongo Bongo! I've looking for this! Holy shit..."
"Can I help you with something, sir?"
"Yeah, gimme my money. Now."
"Ok, do you have an account with us?"
"Fuck! We're not doing this again!" he raised his arm with a drawn weapon. "Gimme all the money in the bank or I'll blow your fucking head off!"
"Sir, that's not a gun, that's a carrot."
"Open the fucking vault!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, cocking his carrot to accentuate that he means business. "This is your last warning!"
"Sir, this bank doesn't do that. We just handle checking deposits and withdrawals, mortgage lending, savings, CDs, retirement accounts - that kinda stuff. If you want, there's First United Methodist Bank on Asstits Avenue, they might be..."
Skibby squeezed the trigger on the carrot and boom - her head exploded upon impact and rained on the other bank employees who, at this point, were replaced with drop-jaw mannequins staring in anaphylactic shock as they questioned with themselves silently everything they believed in about the natural world. As the body of the last living heir to King Herod's fortune slumped to the ground, Skibby leapt over the counter and the headless rag doll of a torso into the vault. The vault had no further safeguard to circumvent.
Minus, of course, the Sphinxtor.
"Son of Man!" screamed the mighty portal muscle that guarded the money, "I am the mighty Sphinxtor - guardian of the gold; protector of the principle; savior of the savings account! No mortal child born of the screaming woman's womb may enter here without submitting to my riddle! If thou hast courage of the heart and fire in thy belly, entrance may be granted. However, if thou failst to solve the riddle of the mighty Sphinxtor, consider life as you once knew it a brief dream in the face of everlasting nightmare! Prepare thyself, mortal!"
Skibby overdosed and died through most of that, but was prepared all the same.
"Once there was a man who thought he was a tree. He grew as tall as a man could be. He filled his gardens full of seeds, and soon they were eaten by the bees. He built his house of brick and stone, but not was it a house that he could own. He used a pot to cook his meat, but the pot refused to let him eat. All his life, the sun was his might, and finally one day, he died in the night. Who was this man?"
"Hey, I got one for you."
"...what?"
"What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the midday, and three legs at night?"
The Sphinxtor was dumbfounded. No one has ever ignored his riddle and had the gall to ask one of his own - especially the very riddle the family of the Sphinxtor was well known for. What manner of man-matter was this humanapod? Who dares speak to a god with such self-centered interest!
"...son of man, perhaps thou art mistaken and afflicted with illusions of understanding. The responsibility of the riddle falls on thy shoulders, not mine. My role in this supernal facade is to disperse and question; not absorb and answer."
"Hey, I didn't ask for your life story there, hombre, I asked you a question. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the midday, and three legs at night?"