Music & Cough Syrup

I sat in a local coffee shop a few days ago, stoned and pondering my way through the evening.

I thought:

• I should not have to submit to authority or be put in a cage every time I do something police don't like.
• Police traffic stops violate my "rightful" freedom. In the words of George Clinton: freedom is free from the need to be free.
• Nothing I have ever voted for has passed into policy. Nothing, and that is fine. The voting system here in America is ultimately corrupt.
• Fuck, I'm stoned.

I pulled my mind together, stood up, and took a look around. There were a couple of lesbians entwined on a couch next to me, feeling eachother's tongues with their own, letting out deep moans. Buried underneath them was a young man, a grin naturally stuck on his face; he was stuck in ecstatic coma. Together, the three of them make up a whiny, emotional folk music band. I would never complain about their presence, it added a nice touch to the atmosphere and makes it easier for me to relax.

As they occupied the couch, lusting on each other, I heard one of them talk about the drugs they were on. They had ingested extraordinarily large amounts of cough syrup to achieve an altered mental state. It worked. The stuff had them fucked up and out of their minds and was likely responsible for their open sexual behavior.

They, the band, had a musical performance scheduled later that night. It was to be a quick, private musical set to compete in a local battle of the bands. There was a prize for the winner, but nobody had a clue what it was.

The ladies got off the couch and tried to figure out how much time there was before they were supposed to play their show. The young man stayed on the couch, with an expression on his face like there were still a couple of hot chicks laying on top of him making out.

Four hours remained until their music performance was scheduled to begin, and it came to light the trio had not performed together in over a year and had no collaborative knowledge of what songs they would, or even could play together.

They talked needing to practice before they played in front of any large groups of people. There was a hint of frantic fear and desperation creeping into their voices, and instead of practicing, they decided it would be better to go to a bar and try to hustle a few drinks and loosen up before their show. The manager of the coffee shop said he would drive them in his car and he asked me if I would stay and watch the shop in case anyone showed up at the door. Not customers, just anyone who happened to come knock on the door. Someone said a drummer might come knocking.

I have been good friends with the manager for years, and I was accustomed to overseeing the shop in his absence.

Everyone left, and I cranked up a little Slayer on the in-house music system.

Before long, there was a strong tapping coming from the glass enterance door. I moved the piece of plywood that blocked the enterance from curious eyes that may happen to be walking down the street. On the other side of the glass, standing in the light rain and cold wind was a large, round man of his early thirties, dressed all in black. His short, stringy purple mohawk stood at attention. Through the glass, I asked him, "Who are you?"

"Lucifer!" I heard him reply.
"Wait.. What?"
He told me his name, but I still had no idea who he was or why he was doing there. Some had told me a drummer may come. I wondered if this was him.
"Do you play drums?" I asked.
"No, I don't play any instruments. I wish I could, though."  he replied.

Having always been a man full of risk and short of caution, I decided to unlock the door and welcome the man to come inside. He said one of the girls had contacted him over the internet and told him to come over. He walked several miles through the cold rain to arrive at the shop. I told him the girls had gone somewhere and I was the only one around at the moment. He didn't seem surprised they had forgotten them. 

We hung out and listened to music while making bullshit conversation, trying to kill time. We slipped into a stoned-out mental state where time had no purpose. I have no idea what this man's state of sobriety was, but he was coherent and seemed to be mostly there upstairs. That is more than I can say for many of people I encounter through my day-to-day adventure that is life. As we talked, we smoked some pot and threw any problems we had in life towards the netherworld. We waited for the shop manager to return with the band, and by the time they they arrived, it was two or three hours later. One of the girls that had been making out with the other on the couch was no longer, and the two remaining band memebers had somehow gotten even higher.

"I don't know how I'm supposed to go onto a stage," one of them said to me in passing, as they came back into the coffee shop. "People are going to look at me and I'm going to have no idea what to do." He was right, the words out of his mouth and the look on their faces led me to believe cough syrup was rotting the two strange, alternative folk singer's minds out like hungry worms of the brain.

I walked into the back to pour myself a cup of coffee. The remaining woman from the band followed me, As I filled my coffee cup, she came up behind me and grabbed my hair and pulled it. Hard. It made me lean back and put me into a submissive position. She licked my face and rubbed her crotch on my leg. She didn't ask me, she told me to give her a kiss. "No," I told her. "I'm not going to kiss you. You've got a gig in just a little while, and you've no idea what you're going to play,and yyou're fucked up in the head. Go get prepared" If I had been feeling a little more frisky or incredibly sad or disgruntled about something, I probably would have let the sado-masochist beast I keep inside of me come out and play and done some very naughty, nasty things to her. I thought instead about the woman I am currently having a lovr affair with. She is someone else's fiance, but my feelings for the woman run deep. This other woman, the crazy bandmember who was tripping balls and grinding on my leg while pulling my hair in a coffee shop couldn't hold a candle to the other woman who actually consistantly keeps my stomach full and my balls empty.
I pushed the woman off me, and there was a new person tapping on the glass door. The manager of the coffee shop went to the door and moved the plywood to see who was tapping. It was another member of the band. This one, a bulky older man. wearing a backpack, was not tripping balls like the others. He was carrying a large djembe drum, looked like a seasoned musician who was ready to play music.

He took a good look at the two bandmates standing before him, who were laughing uncontrollably. He asked me if they were on something, as if it weren't obvious. "Of course they are," I told him. He opened his backpack and pulled out a zip-lock bag filled to the top with fluffy, bright green pot. It smelled delcious, and my stomach grumbled like the smoke was somehow going to end up there instead of my lungs. Hoping to calm his tripping bandmates, he packed a bowl and passed it around. Their staged performance for battle of the bands competition was supposed to begin in less than hour.

The bowl went around, and several joints were also rolled and passed. The two who were tripping finally were calming down a little and picking up their instruments to try making some music. 

They each had a guitar, but one only had three strings, and the other had a broken neck. This led them into a chaotic fit of pacing around the room and mumbling to themselves. They were confused by everything around them. The time they had been scheduled to start playing came and went. Not long after that, however, the tripping singer/guitarist girl stopped her pacing mid-step in the middle of the floor, straightened her straightened her posture, and had some sort of moment of clarity causing her to exclaim:

"Alright! It is time for us to go!" Everyone stared at her for a second in silence, trying to figure out if she was serious or not. Someone asked her about the lack of functioning instruments,  It made her eyes go wide and it looked like she was going to have some sort of violent outburst. She took a deep breath, though and it was easy to tell she had to make a strong mental effort to keep herself orderly.

"We'll find instruments when we get there," she said.

People gathered their things and made their way outside to the cars. I picked up my skateboard and was going to avoid baring witness to the potential trainwreck that was on its way to the stage by heading back to my art studio, but it was cold, windy and raining; not good skateboard weather. I hopped in a car with the guy with the djembe drum and headed with the group to where the event was being hosted.

We arrived. Someone led each of the band members who were tripping balls by the arm through the rain. We found our way inside and there was a large stage set up in the back. There already a band on it and they were rocking out.  "Finally, you're here!" 

Someone handed one if the singer/guitarists would were out of their minds on cough syrup an entry form for the competition. She stared at it with a blank look. "I have no idea what this is,what it means, get this out now my face." She passed it off to the other one who has out of his mind. He held up in the air. The woman who was in charge of the event and judging looked at them, half unsurprised by their obvious mental state and half in annoyed disbelief. "Really?" she asked. She asked the manager of the coffee shop if he could fill it out for them. Although amazingly stoned, he was relatively sober compared to the members of the band except for the djembe player, who was somewhere else in the bar, trying to hide the fact he was associated with the group out of embarrassment of their state. 

He didn't want to perform with them in the competition for fear of soiling his name as a musician here in Daytona Beach, where word spreads quickly between bars about which bands are good and which are a joke. When the band was ushers up to the stage to play, though, he picked up his drum and followed them because he didn't want to hurt and possible chance he had screwing the female singer/guitarist later after the performance. 

I ended up filling out the entry form myself. It asked for the band name and contact information, which I filled out to the best of my ability. Where there was a space to write the "band's tagline, " I scribbled in "Worth the wait... and so much more." 

Up on stage, people working the event set up microphones for the vocals and the drums. They offered cables to plug their guitars into. The girl in the band walked up to one of the microphone stands and said over the speaks: "There are no instruments we have brought."  The woman who was hosting the event let out a deep sigh and looked like she had reached her limits and was about to kick them off stage and out of the bar. One man who had played earlier saw this and looked amused and like he wanted to see what other antics this band had to offer if they stayed on the stage. "I havea guitar you guys can use, " he piped up. "I don't know what kind of music you plan on playing, but here, give this a try." He walked up to the stage and offered them a hallow-bodieded acoustic/electric Flying-V apparently to share between the three of them.

The chick grabbed it and passed it to her fellow singer/guitarist who was sitting on stage next to her atop a bar stool tripping balls. He took it in his hand and held it in his lap like he had never held a Flying-V before. I found out later that he hadn't hadn't when he asked me "what was with that guitar and it's pointyness?"

While he sat shifting it around in his lap, trying to figure out a comfortable way to hold it, she spat out a long string of crazy psycho-babble into the microphone. 

Everyone in the bar looked a little unsettled and confused by the lack of music and the surplus of awkward vibrations coming off the stage. 

"Play some music or get off the stage!" the event manager yelled at them, sending the two with microphones into a giggling fit while the man with the djembe stared at the ground, pretending he was somewhere else and nobody could see him. The event manager rose out of her seat and began walking towards the stage to pull them off.

Suddenly, the young man holding the guitar pulled himself together and found a huge burst of energy that sent everyone in the bar to sit upright and look straight at him while he struck a musical chord on the guitar and let out a loud, harmonic, vocal wail. Now that he seemed to have everyone's attention, he looked around the room in an awkward moment, making eye contact with as many people as possible and giggling to himself under his breath. The low giggle, amplified by the microphone, rolled out the speakers across the bar and sent chills up people's spines making many shift in their seat uncomfortably, slightly disturbed. 

Suddenly he burt out into a song he had obviously played many times before. He sang with extreme emotional conviction in his voice and strummed the guitar and slid his hand up and down its neck like he was softly molesting it. The sound coming out of it said it liked being molested, though, and his voice lulled the guitar and everyone in the bar into an accepting submission. The event manager walked back and sat back in her seat at the judges table.

The music brought tears to some people's eyes as it was so emotionally charged. The man with the djembe held excellent rhythm and it tied all the music together. After four or five songs, the band manager told them to exit the stage, and someone from out group came and ushered the two of them to sit at the bar. Some people bought them drinks and tried picking them up for reasons ranging from sex to music, but they were too messed up in the head to do anything other drink, smile, laugh and nod.

It was late, still cold and raining. I rode back to the coffee shop with the djembe player to take a nap and wait for the rain to stop. The two band members came back, too. I fell asleep drifted to sleep listening to them have sex on a couch a few feet away from me, and I woke up to the female trying to forcibly remove my pants and and get her mouth wrapped around my cock. I tried to stop her, but Im only a man, and eventually I gave in. I took her shirt and came all over her little brown tits.

Everyone else was asleep, so I came back to my art studio and began writing what you have just finished reading. 

Until next time, don't do anything I wouldn't do,  and be sure to subscribe by entering your email on the rightside of the top of this page. 

Ultra Fucked (part 1)

The Reasonless Beast broke his chain and went out on the town last night.  He took my wallet and rent money and threw it to the dogs.

Yesterday evening, an associate of mine asked if I would care to meet him for drinks at an Irish pub on Seabreeze Blvd, here in town. Seabreeze is where all the hipsters and cool cats go to jive and force laughter at each other's bullshit jokes and show off their new haircuts and fashionable punk attitudes. Its not a bad street to bring a nice woman to loosen her up for the old heave-ho later in the night after you try to make her giggle at your own bullshit jokes while sipping on poison, waiting for nervous, sexual tension to leave the room while elephants are welcome to stay as long as they'd like.

My associate picked me up at nine o'clock from a private club and music venue I had skateboarded earlier because the starter on my motorcycle had become dysfunctional and I had to smoked too many cigarettes to have the breath to push start that heavy machine.

We had sat and carried on with our Thursday tradition of drinking seventy-five cent PBR and discussing our future endeavors and current aspirations. Dollars were being fed into the jukebox by socialites and pop music kept coming out; not the sort of stuff I prefer to hear drinking in a pub, but that is just the way the cookie crumbles on Seabreeze. By the time I was a three or four pints in to the evening, my associate had a small circle of friends standing around him laughing. Talking. Touching. Kissing. I couldn't detect any valid emotion in any one, just some kind of satisfaction to be near people as desperate for social interaction as they themselves. They stood, clustered near the seat I kept at the bar.

Another three or four pints later, they had found a table large enough to hold the entire group, and so they went to sit and giggle at bullshit. They pulled me to it. I beckoned to the bartender to bring me another one. I started loosening up a little, throwing my own two cents of pure bullshit into conversations. Another hour passed, and my associate asked if I was ready to get out of there, his wife was wondering when he was coming home and the witching hour was already drawing near.

We made our way out of the pub and onto the street. There were at least six bars, or clubs or whatever you want to call them with their doors open between us and the car. Before we passed the first one, my associate leaned to me and said:

"Yo, lets stop in here and get one more drink. Just to see what's poppin'."

I didn't contest and we stepped through the doors, receiving wristbands on the way in. More loud, fresh, computerized pop songs drowned any constructive thoughts one could've had. At the bar, my associate ordered two jager-bombs and went to the bathroom so I would pay. He had been bumming cigarettes from me all night, but I bum them from him when finances are tight. Finances were indeed tight, though, so it was getting on my nerves. Both my cash supply and my nicotine supply were tight. I had over five hundred dollars in my pocket though, but all of it except for a crisp ten dollars were intended to pay the month's rent for my art studio I've been living out of.

The bartender brought our shots. "Four dollars," she said. I asked her if that were for both, and it was. Good god, that is pretty cheap for two shots on Seabreeze. I grumbled at the thought they were watered down. My associate returned and I handed him the little cup of booze and Red Bull.

"To money," he said. "To the future," I replied. Bottoms went up. My head tilted back as the mixture of booze and energy drink slid into my mouth and my tongue went to the roof of my mouth and my eyes fell shut in ecstasy. I swallowed the mouthful and a warmth spread down my throat and into my chest. Comfort spread through my nerves from my scalp down to around my face through the thin muscles, moving like electricity around my chin, down my throat, out my shoulder into my arms, hands, fingertips, through my core into my penis, down my thighs legs, feet and toes. I went to the moon and back in a split second, and when I came back, my cares, concerns, contemplations and judgemental social outlook were all gone. They stayed up there, in space. They would not return from the nether until the morning. The drink was not watered down.

I opened my eyes and they felt fierce with energy. I was in the now, in my mind, and nowhere else. I knew what I wanted. "Another?" I asked my associate.

"No man, I'm good," he said. "Fuck that," I said to myself, motioning to the sexy bartender for two more. She brought them, I paid her. A hand clapped against my back. I turned around and the bail bonds slash bounty hunter whose office neighbors my art studio was there. "What's up you crazy motherfucker?" He asked. "Nothing man, what brings you out here?" I asked in return. "Nothing man, its my birthday, and I'm trying to fuck this black chick over there." I offered him a shot, but he declined, holding up a cup of vodka. I handed a shot to the associate I came with. "Well, alright man," he said, like I was twisting his arm. I wasn't. Bottoms went up once more, and it was just as good as the first shot.

By the time my nerves had calmed from the drink, my bondsman friend was leaning into my ear. "Hey bro, we're gonna walk over to the stripclub, you wanna come?" I leaned towards my associate, telling him: "Hey, come on man, lets get out of here," and I started walking towards the exit with an unjustifiable lust for balls-out self indulgence.

My associate caught up with me outside and asked "hey man, where are we going?" We joined up with the bondsman and two big black guys. "The strip club," I replied to him. "The what?" he seemed to exclaim more than ask. "We're going to see some titties," I told him. He didn't seem to know what to say or do, and I could tell he battled with his consciousness for a moment with me, the devil, on one shoulder, and the little Puerto Rican girl he's been cheating on his wife with on the other shoulder, both whispering naughty words of seduction into his poor mind's weak will. "Alright," he said, letting out a little nervous chuckle. "Let's do this."

Before long we were across the street and going through the large double-doors into the windowless building. The bondsman and his group were welcome with fistbumps, my associate and I were asked for a five dollar cover. I paid for both of us and went to the bathroom for a much needed piss. I stood at the urinal, holding my penis, watching my piss splash on the porcelain and hoping none was ricocheting back onto my pants, when an old, frail black man with a bowtie came in and sat on a stool next to the sink behind me. I looked at him and he looked at me as I continued to tap my kidney. What the fuck, I thought. It was an odd moment. I dribbled out the last of my pissings, gave a little jiggle from my knees, and tucked my penis back where it goes, zipping it up for discretion, security and privacy. I went to the sink to wash my hands, but there was no soap dispenser. Instead, the old black man took a pinch of powder from a basket and sprinkled some upon my hands. I gave him a look that said, I'm enjoying this as much as you are, buddy, and scrubbed my hands for a second. Now I found there were no paper towels. The black man produced some from a secret location and offered them to me. "Thanks, pal," I told him. I dug into my pockets and found a dollar. I tossed it into his tip basket. He never said a word, and I am thankful for that. While I am in a dimly lit windowless establishment to pay sad, broken whores to tempt me with their body, I prefer not to have an old black man in a bowtie to oversee my pissing and hand washing or to make sure I am not doing anything illicit in the restroom. 

I joined the others at the bar. "Where'd you go, get a dance?" the bondsman asked me. "No, no, just took a piss while a black man watched." His big black buddies furred their brows towards me. I gave them a little wink before ordering a beer from a young woman in a g-string. She brought my beer and I handed her a one hundred dollar bill, asking her for some singles in my change. I gave five or ten of those singles to my associate and took my beer to the stage. He did not follow. I stuck two dollars in the collar of my shirt and sat there like a pervert for a bit, watching naked, young women shove their pussies and tits into other men's faces while sipped my beer and sucked on a cigarette like it was my own cock and only friend, until I grew tired of waiting for my turn with the ladies and went back to the bar.

I remained at the bar, mostly naked women came and went, trying to hustle drinks out of me or to get me to pay them bring me to the back room and take off the rest of their clothes and grind on me and clap their tall heels together in front of my face, but I blocked their attempts just for the fun and sport of telling whores no.

Somewhere around here I remember receding into my mind just long enough to find a nice comfy intertube to climb in and shove off to drift along the lazy river in my mental paradise as I sipped on another fresh, delicious beer. I lit a cigarette and took sweet, slow drags as I surveyed the room through my glasses. There was finally some good music coming out of the speakers, whatever it was, and there were at least four sets of fine, suckable titties up on the stage, all accompanied by curving little asses, tight bodies, and a pair of hands gripping long, shiny poles, hoisting the rest of the packages up into the air to thrust, seduce, satisfy, luring cash right out of pockets. Can't swipe a credit card in any stripper's ass that I've ever seen, not that I've got any working plastic, anyhow.

The next wave of events is still a little hazy, but things clear up after I started drinking bourbon. My bondsman friend said he was leaving the strip club, and I asked where the birthday boy was going. He said he was off to the bottle club. I asked my associate if he wanted to go, but he was throwing in the towel. Last calls were about to start echoing through bars and clubs all over town, and the bottle club was just opening it's doors. I grabbed my longboard out of my associate's car and hitched a ride with the bondsman and the big black dudes. We dropped off one black dude along the way.

To be finished soon.