Welcome to In Between Altered States Episode 3. This dream will take you on a trapped ride that moves you through all the strange women (and a few men) that may have come across in your life. These ladies will bubble up in your subconscious, make you stop and wonder how you ever knew them in the first place and why you can’t get them out of your heads. Again, IBAS is set up to be read from start to finish so you get the full effect but feel free to tap these fine writers individually as well: Lara Konesky, Jason Fisk, Elly Portnoy, Tim Murray, Doug Mathewson, Michael San Filippo, Robert Vaughn, and Hzar Worth. Thanks for reading and dreaming.
Category: Episode 3
A little about me:
I’m training to be a blackjack dealer but I don’t want to work right now. I’m also building my Manga and Hellblazer collection. I play video games. I like most pasta or anything Italian, Swedish meatballs, tortilla. Sometimes I can be thinking to myself of a comic and their material or something and I’ll just randomly burst into laughing. I have a good laugh though, so I’m usually forgiven. I also randomly say “Yo Mama” for no good reason. I don’t really read much, when I do it’s comic books or erotic literature. I am hopefully moving to Alabama soon. I have a motorcycle and I wear a helmet and drive real slow ’cause I like my brain shaken- not stirred, blended, and liquefied. I like drinking and smoking. Recently I’ve been trying to pull myself out of the bar scene, at least to enjoy life a little more, but I still get tanked and have fun. In my spare time I write short paranormal stories for both adults and young adults. Nothing has been published yet, but I have hope. As for music, I love Trace Adkins along with Flyleaf and Nickleback. I really enjoy swimming, dancing, softball, and volleyball. I am a Pagan and actively practice Hoodoo Magic. I try to keep an active lifestyle, but who am I kidding, I’m a little bit lazy. I’ve been an ovo-lacto vegetarian since August 4, 1997. I’m not talking that alien gibberish, but for example: our planet is just hanging out there in space…which is our galaxy…but where is our galaxy? When does it stop? How far can you go before you can’t go anywhere? I was a 4-H member for 10 years and am currently the superintendent for the Cat and Herpetology projects. My goal in life is to get married, have a couple of kids, and just live happily ever after…
My neighbor, Rita, was a strange cheapskate. She would mow her lawn in the middle of the night with a halogen spot-light on her helmet. When she raised money for Unicef, she blew it all on a new sofa made of recycled popcorn. It squeaked. She still has it and I won’t sit there. Once she lied about sponsoring one of those kids in Africa, you know, the Sally Struthers commercials. I wouldn’t normally care, but I know it’s not true.
Last Friday, Becky Cardoza hosted a pot-luck party, which I thought was super. Kick off the summer, send the kids bowling or something. I arrived early, brought a dime bag and an outrageous bong shaped like a penis. Becky and I caught a buzz in her gardening shed while her husband, Stu, dropped the kids at the movies. We giggled about Rita’s latest: she’d become an Mary Kay rep. You wouldn’t catch us wearing that crap.
Lots of folks brought classy stuff. The Smithsons arrived with steamed clams. And Herb, our golf pro at Whispering Winds, raffled free lessons. I liked flirting with him, well, until he’d had more than one beer. Then he got a little too touchy-feely. Rita found the entire pot-luck idea insulting. So she arrived with a plastic party tray: one dozen perfectly carved melon balls.
Gert Grundy had about all she could take of her niece Cassidy Cheyenne and her god damn holier than thou attitude, tossing down a “Two much information” penalty flag with an extra huge box-car load of heavy mascara eye rolling.
Who the heck was she, with her chopped and cropped Motley Crue top and her low gunslinger grimy bottoms, her tramp-stamp tattoos of skeletal hands and Hells own flames climbing climbing up out of her unwashed personal situation.
Just one mention of the old days when Gert played the roadhouse circuit with her exotic dance routine “Ginger And Her Snaps”, one little mention of a twist and a tumble in the double sleeper of a purple Peterbilt with Texas tags and now Cassidy was all crapily disposed and huffy.
I like that, thought Gert, Jesus himself knows I love her, but that girl with her no-account trailer trash unemployed friends, drinking beer and being snippy and rude after what all I done for her, alright,…. for her momma to be truthful (won’t never forget that drunk “Thelma and Louise” summer of ours), and I made her momma a promise before she got sent away to do right by her child, and one way or t’other I will.
From the bottom of the “Farm n’ Family” sized Quaker Oaks container Gert fished out her solution and unwrapping it from the Hoppin’ Rabbit plastic bag while she sorted out the mail, opening one letter of especial particular interest and saw there was a might choice to make, which she pondered as she absentmindedly slipped bullets into her big old Smith & Wesson revolver now free of the bag.
Gert’s mind shifting back and forth between loading the gun and reading that letter, choices, choices what to do? should she just plain shoot Cassidy Cheyenne dead right where slumped on the porch next to the spare washing machine, passed out from smoking cheap weed, or rob another highway package store and get a little money towards an expensive future, a hard hard nut to crack indeed.
Oh, the hell, do the right thing I suppose, wake the kid, tell her the news that she’s going to off to school in the fall, then later on go rob up some money towards tuition, Med School at Yale ain’t gonna come cheap!
I was like, really happy when Al mentioned me in therapy.
Mainly because that means I am important.
Sometimes I have low self esteem.
There are times when Al has no idea how to stand up for herself.
So, I have to take a hammer to that big giant imposing bubble she has around her at all times.
Sometimes a hammer, but I like to use my fucking fists.
Sometimes, she does battle with the bubble on her own, but she tends to cry about it.
“New age therapy, it’s just like that.” She says.
“It makes you cry?” I ask.
“It makes you cry, and then it makes you hate yourself, and then you are okay for a while.”
“That sounds strangely like my masturbation sessions.” And she laughs because thats what she does. She laughs at me when I am disgusting. She doesn’t think I am disgusting.
But, I tell her that I saw her before she even gave me the time of day, and the bubble never scared me anyway, because I don’t give a shit about that. I once beat up a lady in a Target parking lot. So, the bubble is nothing more than a really unattractive dress. And sometimes, I have to tell her that the dress is not that flattering on her. That she probably just looks better naked, or in a nice pair of jeans and form fitting tank.
The bubble is my bitch now, but soon it will be Al’s. Soon Al will be able to punch through the giant imposing bubble without a football player and without a silly girl who fights too much.
Soon, Al will knock the shit outta that bubble.
Soon.
She was the engine. An absent name mentioned to me in the backlogs of dreams.
I would follow her across the difficult days pursuing me. I was without a true and proper home.
I had abandoned my legacy. I had relinquished my freedoms to taste the sweetness from her eyes.
‘Are you to bring me your medicines..?’
The question didn’t phase me. I took to her secrets as if I was the top-soil of her mass fields, made lonely by the Sun and quenched by the Stars and Moon above.
‘I am the wheel attached to the center’s balance. I am the stone surrendered before the heart can return home….’
But I had no true and proper home. But I had no crown to call my own. But I had no words left to borrow.
She wasn’t impressed by my facades.
‘Are you willing to become my medicines..?’
My mouth formed a worthless gesture, and for a significant moment I felt my body wavering unsteadily as the water levels continued to fall beneath the acceptable levels of my wounded doubts.
‘Are you willing to become my medicines..?’
I was shoved aside. The momentum casting me into the strangling deeds of shallow waters waiting for me to let my guard down. Her voice was the sound of a car wreck being played in reverse. The drowning daggers of the waters slit open my sudden Lust….
His hand shook my shoulders violently.
‘..cmon Mister…the engine died. We have another bus for you to take.’
His breath was rancid with regret and poor eating habits. A damp piece of cheese left out in the Sun first, and then the rains….
Outside of the bus, thunder shook apart the Night like an angry old dog still in pursuit of the hunt.
I remember making a conscious decision not to care that the windows were rolled up tight in the Chevy Suburban: Chicago to Minnesota . I didn’t have my inhaler, drowning in the sweet smelling haze, gasping for air and I didn’t care. I deserved the shallow breaths that blocked life; my life. And I remember feeling removed like a pervert would feel, blatantly looking and not caring. And I didn’t care. I remember drinking myself away from the beginning. I remember telling her that I didn’t believe in washing my feet. I said that I started with my hair and washed down toward my feet but not my feet. I figured they were already clean with all of the soap that had already passed over them. I started telling her about my scrambled egg mess back in Chicago . I remember her uneasy look. It said so much, her uneasy look. And then self-destruction stopped me cold in the middle of the fire. Someone tackled me out of the flame. I laughed on the ground under him. I remember the Leatherman (an all purpose tool, knives, needle nose pliers, screwdrivers) that he gave to us groomsmen. My full name engraved on the side. I remember pissing in the reception hall bathroom forget the toilet I thought; death tool in hand, hate grip on the multi-purpose tool; carving my name into the stall wall; pissing everywhere; urine yellow; toilet paper yellow. As I watched him dial the police, I imagined him being pulled apart by some cosmic invader sucking his limbs away piece by piece by piece. I remember trying to find somewhere to sleep that night; somewhere safe to sleep; somewhere my tool wouldn’t be bothered and the engraved name could rest in peace. I’m so sorry you don’t have a name…
Nobody in the family knew what to do about Carl. So, they fed him acid by the sheet. Now Carl plays pool and gets erections when the nurse’s assistant inserts the catheter into his bladder. He watches his roommate eat cigarette butts and laughs. Carl sounds like a pig with laryngitis when he laughs. Sometimes he asks his house manager if he could please have three dollars so he can go to Mary’s. Even Carl knows that Mary’s serves beer until one in the morning and the girls take all their clothes off, and if you get close enough, you can smell the mystery rubbed into their shiny skins. Every Thanksgiving, Carl puts on his favorite plaid shirt and paisley tie. He stands at the bathroom counter, coaxing his myriad cow-licks to lay flat. After he gives up, the hairs are still flailing, perma-tripped and defiant. Carl and his hair wander into the living room and freeze mid-stride in front of the forest-green leather couch. His arms are poised like a mannequin’s, bent at the elbow, leaning away from his trunk at awkward, unlifelike angles. The staff can hear him muttering under his breath angrily, but the words are mostly incoherent. Carl dedicates these rambling monologues to his hallucinogenic experiences. Sometimes Carl is pleased with his delusions, other times he is terrified of what he sees. When the glaze drips out of his eyes, Carl lowers himself onto the couch. Perched on the edge of the cushion, he glowers at the door. He is sure this will be the year his family comes for dinner.
Kate’s friend was looking for some candles. Kate thought it would help if I looked at candles for a while. I told her I was ready to go outside again, but I was just thinking about telling her I was ready to go outside again, and then Kate’s friend came back with some candles.
The candles looked like melted crayons and were the size of beer cans. Kate cracked her lighter and the flame popped and the wicks hissed. I watched the fire grab hold but I also watched them, Kate and Kate’s friend, watching me.
Kate picked me up at the station the night before. She was wearing a Santa hat because it was Christmas Eve. She hugged me and frowned and gave me a candy cane. Back at her place, Kate’s friend asked if I’d rather sleep on the futon or the floor.
I kind of wanted to go outside again, but they didn’t want me to go outside again. They found me in the backyard standing by the tracks, and they didn’t want me to stand by the tracks. And Kate’s friend found those candles.
So I watched the wax pool at the base of the wicks like they wanted me to do, but I was really thinking about trains.
In Between Altered States 