I wasn’t quite sure where I was when I woke up. I’d opened my eyes, seen the bed and saw the Nagel portrait on the wall. And, from that first impression realized I wasn’t in my own apartment. As the bits and pieces of the following day began to creep in, I remembered where I was.
However, this was thrown all off kilter by the fact that my things were intermingled with things like the Nagel picture, a toy Persian cat with a diamond necklace around its stuffed head and empty bottles of Dom Perignon; my bookcase, my fishing pole and chest of drawers.
Barring the obvious, the weeks of heavy substance abuse, something wasn’t
I wandered out of the bedroom and Jeff was at my kitchen table, on the
computer, eating an omelet of sorts. But then, I looked to the right and realized that usually my kitchen table wouldn’t be over there.
Things were all flip-flopped. Meg was in a different kitchen, scrambling
more eggs and dripping coffee. However, my sofa was now in her living room
too, and another bookcase of mine was too.
I’d finally fallen hard through the looking glass. There was no turning back now.
But every minute felt like that, the passage of a new threshold from which I
would never return from.
“Look who is finally awake,” she said, giving me a horrible start.
Jeff looked up over his shoulder and asked, “What’s up skipper?”
I must have looked at him oddly and then her because she finally said, “Oh,
we felt bad about you getting evicted so we moved all your shit into my apartment tonight.”
“Yeah,” Jeff joined in. “There’s still a few things down there of yours but
nothing that looked important. Dirty clothes, some kitchen stuff and some
old freezer-burned shit that I just left in there.”
That explained it; sort of. Something still seemed to be amiss. Meg walked out with a tray in her hands and she motioned for me to sit on my sofa and her white coffee table.
“We threw my sofa out, it had a spring shooting up through the seat,” she
explained, setting the tray down.I must have given her an alien look because she reiterated the point.
“Sit,” she said. “It’s food. Breakfast Mexican Caribbean style. Migas, flank
steak and tortillas, fried plantains, black beans and cubed papaya. It’s not
poisoned. Go ahead, eat Don King.”
“Don King,” I asked.
“Yeah, the Don King of mud wrestling,” she said. “I can’t believe you got me
entered. Randy has called about four or five times just to make sure we’re all really coming.”
The ugly reality of it all came flooding back now and the truly insidious
thing about it was that they were taking it in stride, unfazed. Something was amiss. I couldn’t put a finger on it. I sat down and ate a mouthful of black beans. They were good. I took a bite of the flank steak and the of plantain. It was quite tasty, which struck me as odd because she didn’t really strike me of much of a cook.
Home wrecker possibly, but a cook, to any degree, just didn’t seem right.
She looked at me again and asked if I was all right before finally wandering away, back to the table where she began unfolding a map.
The food was good. Did I already say that, I mused to myself. Did I say that
out loud? Your brain is all fucked up, I hissed at myself. Christ, get a
grip.
And I did; or tried to at least. The going wasn’t easy and when I looked up
from a bean and flank steak fajita, I had realized they had converted the
table, the computer and nearby wall into some sort of weird war room geared
for travel. Maps were posted everywhere. Jeff was making notes in notebook
and Meg was making a list or something in a small notepad, one of my
reporter pads.
I can’t say how long it had been since I had had a full course meal,
complete with meat, fruit, vegetables and breads. There had been the meal of
rabbit a day or two before, but the days prior were only sprinkled with
meager scraps, the occasional piece of meat. It was dark outside and I had
no idea what time or day it was.
And, I couldn’t help but feel as if something bad, something else had
happened. They were too calm. I reached down for the glass in front of me
and took a sip as Meg sat down and turned the TV on to the Weather Channel.
I almost spit out whatever was in my cup
“What is this crap?” I asked, suddenly paranoid.
“It’s Earl Gray,” she said.
“Who?” I asked.
Jeff was laughing.
“Tea, you idiot,” she said. “You’re acting weird. What’s wrong with you.
Jeff maybe we should take him to the hospital.”
He just started laughing again. Why were they feeding me tea? Was there acid
in it? They were certainly acting subversive enough, very conspicuous. And then it hit me. That was what was wrong.
They were sober, stone cold sober. They weren’t drunk. They were
bright-eyed, mundane and boring. They weren’t stabbing holes in the wall or
slurring or puking. Those rotten stinking fools.
“I don’t think he needs a hospital,” Jeff said to her, as if I weren’t even
in the room.
“It looks like we have good driving weather,” she said, flipping the channel
before I could make out the date or time.
“I just told you that ten minutes ago you moron,” he said.
“Fuck you fat boy,” she said.
Okay, so maybe things were really okay. As she flipped the channel I must
have looked at her because she looked at me.
“What?” she asked rudely.
“Put it back I want to see something,” I told her.
“You hear this, Storm God wants to watch the Weather Channel,” she said to
Jeff. She rolled her eyes and then fixed her gaze back on me.
Storm God? What the fuck were they blithering about?
“Why do you want to watch the Weather Channel?” she said. “You’re the Storm
God, you should know what the weather is going to be like.”
Jeff was chuckling again.
“Be nice now,” he told her.
“Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do in my own damned apartment,” she said to
him.
They were impossible. I couldn’t handle them. I couldn’t deal with them when
they were drunk and running amok and it was becoming painfully obvious that I sure as hell couldn’t deal with them when they were sober.
She looked back at me and said,” Tell me why I should turn the Weather
Channel on for you.”
“Out of human decency,” I said.
“Who says I’m decent, or human,” she said.
“You got that right,” I muttered under my breath.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“That’s what I thought you said. A whole lot of nothing,” she said, smiling
to herself, not even trying to feign subtlety in her efforts at baiting me.
“You don’t know what day it is do you? Or what time it is?”
She had me.
“No,” I admitted grinning to myself. “So just turn it on.”
“Guess,” she said.
Jeff was laughing loudly at this point.
“Jesus you’re an awful little cretin aren’t you?” he asked.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“You heard me shit for brains. Storm God. Guess, you tell me what today is,
what time it is.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I said guess anyway,” she muttered.
“Please, smoke a joint, have a Bloody Mary, just do something with
yourself,” I told her.
“I am doing something with myself, I’m amusing myself at your expense Storm
God,” she said giggling. “Seriously, I’m thoroughly enjoying myself, aren’t you?”
I wanted to slap her senseless. I’ve never been one to ever advocate violence against women. I was raised to love them, the whole respect and honor thing. I’d had had a redneck uncle that used to shove my aunt around and he and I almost came to blows over it.
Indeed. I’d gone through nearly 30 years of life and had never once even come close to even thinking about hitting a woman. It was a cowardly business but as much as I loathed it, I suddenly began to understand it to a degree. Within a few short days of knowing this woman something had snapped. She’d exposed the ugly parts of me to myself with all the skill of a drunken surgeon with a chainsaw in hand.
In some situations, like love, this is not a rare or even unpleasant thing.
But under these circumstances it was heinous.
There was no method to her madness. No rhyme or reason to it. If she couldn’t strike a nerve on the first attempt she would just gouge and gouge until she found something. She reminded me of a vulture. You couldn’t wait her out. All you could do was hope to get to shelter and lock her out before you collapsed and died.
No, I didn’t want to slap her. I wanted to grab her by her hair and bang her
skull repeatedly into a wall.
“Don’t even fucking think about it,” she said. “I will fuck you up.”
And she read minds too.
“What are you talking about freak?” I asked. “Give me the damned remote and
turn the Weather Channel on.”
“Oh, you don’t think I can see what’s in your eyes,” she said, with an edge
in her voice.
“Girls, girls, you’re both pretty,” Jeff said.
“No, I’m serious. I’ve seen that look before,” she said.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just a little disorientated.”
“It’s fucking Wednesday asshole,” she hissed. “It’s about
“Stop it,” Jeff yelled, slamming his hand onto the table. “Behave, both of you before I put the leeches to you.”
He stood up and, sweet mother of Jesus, lit a joint, a real fat one. He walked over to her and handed it to her. She resisted it at first and then finally took it, taking a large hit before passing it to me.
“What is this Storm God shit and what do you mean a few days,” I said,
snatching the joint from her and sucking it greedily.
“He’s faking, he knows what he did,” she said.
“No, I don’t think he does,” Jeff said as I passed the joint to him.
I knew before they began that I didn’t want to hear the sordid details of
this story.
Jeff hit the joint, exhaled and hit it again and began.
“Dude, you’ve been asleep for damn near 40 hours now. You scared the shit out of us both. We thought you were in a coma,” he said.
As grim as it sounded, it wasn’t that bad.
“Don’t hold back,” Meg said as she took the joint from Jeff, who was just
standing there holding it as he pondered some weird inner truths. “Tell him about Storm God.”
I didn’t want to hear about this Storm God business, this I knew. But Jeff was practically beside himself, trying to keep himself from pissing on himself in fits of laughter.
“Well man, you woke up at one point,” he said. “We had a bitch of a storm the other day. Tropical storm force winds. And out of nowhere you woke up. You walked out here wearing sweatpants and refused to talk to us. We were worried because you’d already slept like 24 hours or so. You were pissed at us though.”
“You said some very sick things, and this is coming from me, the queen of illness,” Meg said.
“You went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Mescal, the shit with the
worm in it,” Jeff said. “You just started downing it like it was water. It was the most disturbing thing I’d ever seen in my life. We were trying to wrestle the bottle from you when the storm knocked the power out.”
“And then all hell broke loose,” she said. “You screamed like a banshee and
then things started breaking. We were blinded so we couldn’t see what you were doing.”
“You plowed me down like a damn rag-doll, like you were a Steelers defensive
lineman,” Jeff said.
“And then you tackled me and shoved your cock into my mouth,” Meg said. “Had
I not been so wasted and had you not tasted so damn good I would have probably bit it off.”
These were very ugly things they were saying. Until this point I had not had
a bonafied episode; a full throttle blackout.
“Did I at least come?” I asked, semi laughing.
“No but you started to try to fuck me with the Mescal bottle so I pushed you
off of me,” she said. “Tell him about the lightning.”
“That was downright wicked,” he said. “We were scrambling in the dark trying
to light a candle or something and then a burst of thunder shook the place, lightning lit the room up for days. A transformer out on the pole outside fucking blew up, caught fire. But you had blood all over your face and chest.”
“It was then that you started ranting about blood sacrifices in the name of the Storm God,” Meg said.
“And the you ripped off all your clothes and ran out into the hallway,” Jeff added. “At first you were looking for Darren. The whole complex was in darkness. You were crazy but you made it downstairs.”
“That’s when the real fun began,” Meg said. “You ran out into the middle of the courtyard, out in the grass and you were yelling at the sky.”
“I am Storm God, lord of the four winds, I conjure thee oh storm to strike
terror and flood into the heart of man, or some crazy shit like that. You just wouldn’t stop,” he said. “Then you started going on about bridesmaids and albatrosses and how we were doomed if we went to
Yeah, but then he started going on about pirates, treason and bloodletting
on the high seas,” Meg said.
You people just have to shut up now,” I said.
You were a fucking case man,” Jeff said. “It finally got pathetic though. You started crying about your ex and you ate a handful of mud. You passed out not long after and we barely got you upstairs.”
We never did find any cuts on your body though, or on any of us, so we don’t know how we saw blood on you when the lightning struck in here,” Meg said.
You scared us fucking sober man,” Jeff said. “This is the first thing we’ve
touched since then.”
Jesus Christ,” I muttered taking a final hit and then sitting back down on
the sofa, hanging my head in my hands.
eg sat beside me and started rubbing my shoulders.
Really, it’s okay now,” she said.
No it’s not okay, you psychopath,” I told her. “Just two minutes ago you were ready to throw down and now you’re rubbing my shoulders like we’re married.”
When you think about it, isn’t that what love is like, explosive one moment, tension filled and then peace and tenderness a few seconds later,” she said.
he words sounded hauntingly familiar.
Sorry,” she said. “I was going through your Word files on your computer. After that episode I wanted to see what it was you were all about. I’m sorry.”
Forget it,” I muttered.
Dude, don’t let it get you down,” Jeff said. ‘We’ve all had our share of episodes over the past few days. What we wanna know is how you got us up here after that night we were in your bathroom.”
And who stabbed all the fucking holes in my walls? Did I do that?” Meg
asked.
No, that was Jeff I said,” finally easing up some, letting the weed take its course.
Shit,” she said. “I don’t even wanna know what happened. Did he and I fuck?”
Had her question been posed at any other time under any different circumstances, I would have laughed at her and called her a whore. But we were exceptions to the rule. I knew this now. The very, very abnormal was becoming our reality.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so, but I think you did have a heart murmur. Or
you just passed out.”
“Lovely,” she said.
“We have to be hitting the road soon,” Jeff finally said. “We’ve got a lot of shit to do and Randy keeps calling. He’s upped the ante to like 15 grand but he said you’d be covering city council meetings too if we didn’t get their by Friday.”
“Like hell,” I said. “Fuck this guy. This is madness.”
“If we have to I’ll cover city council,” Meg said.
“You’ll what?” I asked incredulously.
“My dad was on the planning and zoning commission for years when I was a kid,” she said. “I know Robert’s Rules of Order better than I do the Lord’s Prayer.”
Somehow I didn’t doubt this.
“Yeah and we’ve got a lot of shit to do still before we’re fully on the road,” Jeff said. ‘We have to go see my mom, we have to go hire someone to drive her boat down around the peninsula. And when all is said and done we have to go get my shit out of my old house.”
This wasn’t part of the deal. They were all things we’d hashed around but
never made any firm plans on.
“What are you talking about you swine?” I asked.
“Lets just get on the road,” Meg said. “Sun’s going to be up soon. We need Bloody Mary’s.”
“I told you Meg, we don’t need to drink on the way there,” Jeff said, suddenly the public information officer for the Betty Ford Clinic.
Jesus, I thought. We were doomed.
