BABYSTEPS TO BABYLON

(What is all this? This is the continuing saga of my real New Orleans adventure of spring 2001.
A fictionalized account was written and presented as Peaceful Sleazy Feeling.

This is the real story, as compiled from my filthy, muck-stained journals of days gone by, and girls done worse.

Enjoy. If you're new, then read the prologue in the post below...)
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WRITHE & SHINE

EPISODE I: BABYSTEPS TO BABYLON.


“The Universe may not only be queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.”
—J.B.S. Haldane


I woke up on a beer-stained couch; where was I at, today? Where had I been last night? These things seemed less important as the day drew on. Since I lost my squalid flat, I had been roaming couch to couch among my friends. By the look of the spacey grandeur all around me, it seemed I fell asleep at the Professor’s house last night. Technically, I’m staying there—but I need a break sometimes, and just way too many folks pass through for me to keep my things there.

It was spring, and I was blessed: I had been greatly gifted with the greatest gifts of life—unemployment, loneliness, financial devastation, sickness and much more. The greatest gifts of life involved being relieved of your burdens long enough to be yourself for yourself, and best of all, by yourself for every precious moment that was once denied. Work was an odd scenario—my performance declined without Ritalin; my insurance from work disabled me from regularly attaining it (HMO meaning “Hinder Medications’ Obtainment”). Unable to wait one more month for my new appointment, I was fired, so that I would be freed from my insurance, and thus enabled to purchase it illegally from college kids again with a clear conscience. Soon thereafter, I took a hideous trip to the south. Well, sort of. Okay…not really. This did not, however, keep me from writing a biting article of the experience—nor, as many secretly commented, did it hinder my imagination in the slightest. That would be an inside joke.

I haven’t been to the gym in ages—I owe way too much money. I expect my muscles will atrophy within the week, like some coma patient, quadriplegic, or network TV watcher. I had expected to gain weight as well, but therein was a surprise—far from assuming the god-form of the Eggplant People, or the need to apply for my own zipcode, I have actually lost 12 pounds. The downside, of course, is that it was in muscle-mass, brain matter, remaining virtues, and concern for my fellow man. Oh well. Such is life.

This is not to say that I don’t have fun; like the Happy Hooker, my business is my pleasure. Presently, my pleasurable business involves staging a grand and perilous Endtyme Jihad for an upcoming article. During casual dreck-trek quests along the Humana Superdriveway, I happened upon and had gone by ranting rivulets of sackclothed nutsacks dead certain that the Time of Man is bygone and certainly dead. Some were fierce prophets and prayer warriors with direct links to God and HTML visions of Hell; others claimed to be God—His newest incarnation for the New Age, and the oldest game in town.
As none referred to the other, it became my duty to make them aware of one another. This was done by obtaining hotmail-type e-mail accounts, from which to send chiding testimonies aglow of miracles the others performed. I also scored e-mail addresses with the prophets’ own names; this added to their godhood by lending them omnipresence. Soon, I shall have one challenge another to a duel. May the best Jesii win.

But it’s all on hold for now; my bags are packed. My friend, The Drunken Master (Mark, by birth), had invited me on a trip. To drive home the irony of writing a fanciful story of a doomed New Orleans road trip, he had invited me on a real (doomed) New Orleans road trip. And he would even pay my way.

Like my “trip” with Rick & Co., Mark The Drunken Master did not know I couldn’t drive. He also didn’t know that I was a stranger in that town, and didn’t know my way around to save my life. He drove like the Devil to get us there on time—nearly 13 hours straight. His eyes were red and demon-licked by the time we reached our goal—and I really wasn’t any better off. I’d been hammering away for days on drafts of Peaceful Sleazy Feeling—ironic that it was proofread on this trip. Having been up for three days straight—and hideously out of dope now—I drifted in and out throughout the voyage there—and fell asleep, eyes half open, on my hair. When I awoke at a Mississippi Stuckey’s mart, my eyes were scuffed and bloodshot, forcing me to take my contacts out. I didn’t own a pair of glasses; thus this trip would prove a blindman’s jamboree. This detail will come strongly into play in further events.

* * *

The drive down is such a blur, regardless of my vision at the time. I was still so damn hungover, and my drugs were all long gone. There’s something you all should know: when I wrote PSF, prior to this trip, I locked myself in a room for two straight weeks, and never left. I slept only when my weary eyes blinked out. I’d become a little paranoid, and delusional—thinking that my characters were alive, and out to get me. If any of you feel fooled by Peaceful Sleazy, rest assured that for a time—a Lennonesque Lost Weekend, I believed it all myself, as well. I was a mess at this point, in no condition to go anywhere. And yet, here I was….zipping down the road in Mark’s corvette…

What does still stand out, however, is a place in Southern Missouri known as Lambert’s. It was the “home of the throwed roll,” whatever that meant. Well, apparently, it meant some walking beansprout of a manchild hurled breadclumps like invectives at my head. It was an experience. And then there was the Sorghum Guy. Sorghum Guy moped from aisle to aisle, drawling in a droopy dog of a voice, “Sorghum…sorghum for your rolls…” It was in identicle cadence to Monty Python’s “bring out your dead” sketch from Holy Grail. He sounded miserable. Before we left, I threw a roll back at him, and bopped him on the head. Fuck it, we were leaving the state…

While there, I’d ordered some inedible pig flesh concoction. They were like soggy porkskins, fat off the back of a hog, and smeared in grease. Hey, it looked good on the menu… I couldn’t eat them all, and wedged them in a to-go box in the back. In retrospect, I guess I should have put them in a cooler… But that, too, will come in later on.

* * *

Hope…it melts before your eyes, and not your hands. We were on the way to Babylon, stumbling into sin by inches, shame for miles to come—at least we sort of hoped. I gazed into the blurry sky…it was only a blur to me.
“Every star is out tonight,” the Drunken Master commented. I wouldn’t know; I can barely see three feet ahead. “I guess it’s all perspective,” I said. Just then something bit me on the ankle, while inside something hit me in the chest: there was some strange sort of meaning to be had there, and I’d just let it slip by. But still, I felt hungover, and as such I chose to let it slip until the headache passed.

“Jesus Christ, what is that smell?” Mark sniffed around as he stepped into the car. “It’s smells like someone’s feet…” I waited for the Son of God to answer, and finally sought to weigh in on my own. I recognized it immediately. It was those salty, greasy, pork flaps…they’d spilled out somewhere in the car, and were buried somewhere hard to get to. “Leave ‘em,” we thought. How bad can that get? Oh wait…


* * *


When we “touched down,” Mark handed me his cellphone. I called my then-sorta-kinda-girlfriend/keeper, Nightshade. I’d failed to tell her I was leaving. Whoops.
She wasn’t upset; I knew she wouldn’t be. She was one of the few who understood these things. Of course, she was under the impression that I’d gone back. (She’d read my early drafts of Peaceful Sleazy). I hadn’t yet the heart or testes to tell her what went on (or truly, what did not). I promised to bring her something back, and wield the cock upon my safe return.

Our car parked in a multi-level public pay garage, we drug our bags like drunken miners to a hotel far too many streets and streetlights down.

The hotel was old and falling down; it matched much of my description of the PSF “_otel.” The paint was peeling; the help was rude; the couches were all stained—and drunks and other loiterers convened in tribal battalions in the halls. Mark’s uncle had paid for the room; this hotel had nostalgic value for him. It was certainly a relic—I’ll give it that. The uncle had paid for two rooms yesterday; after a quick call from Mark’s cellphone, an unassuming fellow met Mark in the hallway, and slyly slipped him a key to the second room. Bypassing the front desk, and its haggard Clerk Of The Evil Eye, we ascended an ugly carpeted flight of stairs. The carpet smelled like a porn-store floor—those bits between the restroom and the Anal Hardcore rack. The paint was blue at some stage of its life—now it simply “was,” and that was that. Again…it was eerily like the shanty I’d described. But that was not the punchline, folks.

We (or Mark’s uncle) had been assigned Room 223. But when we approached that blessed desired-of-all-ages plank-with-bad-hinges—sweet asylum with a greasy knob—we observed that something wasn’t as it ought. “220…221…222…” read The Drunken Master, “Here’s our room, and—hey! This can’t be right… I do believe a number’s fallen off!” He smugly flicked the lying entrance, and fumbled for the key. The room had now become “Room 23.” Remember that one? That was our room in Peaceful Sleazy Feeling. It’s also the most haunted room—and center of plot development in my novel, Chasing Phantoms. And in that book, the room partly displays its hauntedness (or cursedness, if you prefer) by rearranging the numbers on the door…from 223 to 23, and back. The hits just keep on coming.

The novel was yet unpublished; the story was a rough draft, having been read by a mere three sets of eyes, apart from my weary, wary own. Synchronous or ominous, incubus or succubus, God the Father of the Bible, or the Cosmic Trickster written of by Fort and Keel, clearly something laughed at my expense.
Clearly something wanted my attention.
Clearly that attention was deserved.
Clearly that attention was procured.

Robert Anton Wilson—an author whom I greatly admire—had a theory of the number “23.” It seems to turn up everywhere, you see. Its synchronicities and occurrence in anomalies are legion, myriad. And they show up in occult phalanxes the moment you take notice of it all. Of course, expectations bring us what we might expect, he’d likely say (he and Keel would be in agreement over this). But “23” is creepy, nonetheless, and not the least because you noticed when you were told.
It was as tribute, or a nod, to Wilson that I chose “23” in PSF. But what—if not the void, and mortal imagination’s want—had chosen to pay tribute, or a nod…to me?


TO BE CONTINUED...


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