The Lucky Lady: A Strip Club Adventure

By Jake

Rick and Joey stand on the lawn of Rick’s parents’ house playing a game of bloody knuckles.  A red station wagon pulls up.  Rick and Little Joey rush into Tommy’s car.  Kid Rock blares on the stereo.  Rick and Little Joey could hear it from a block away.  

“Hey fuckheads,” Tommy shouts.

Rick sits in the passenger seat.  He reaches over to punch Tommy in the crotch, but Tommy smacks his arm away.  Rick laughs.  Little Joey cackles in the backseat.  He’s sitting in the middle, lurched forward.

“So homos,” Little Joey shouts over the Kid Rock song, “what are we doing tonight?”

Tommy is drumming on the steering wheel to the song.  A smile creeps across his face.  “We are going to the titty bar, you faggots.”  They all let out a cleansing primal scream.  Even Kid Rock does, shouting his own name, as “Bawitdaba” restarts.

One week prior to these events, Rick had come into $600.  His grandmother passed away after suffering from Alzheimer's and leaking brain fluid from a fall on her bathroom floor.  The $600 was his inheritance.  He had already spent $500 of it on cigarettes, alcohol and fast food.  Rick loves Burger King.  He can devour several Whoppers in any state of intoxication.  With his last $100 he was planning on paying for all of their night at the strip club.

“I’m a cowboy, baby,” they all sing while twirling an imaginary cowboy hat above their heads and gyrating their hips like they are riding a horse or awkwardly making love.  After the song ends, Tommy skips back to “Bawitdaba” once more before they arrive at the strip club.

The trip from Rick’s parents’ house to the strip club was about 40 minutes and they had to cross a state line.  The strip club was called the Lucky Lady.  It’s a BYOB joint due to zoning laws.  Can’t serve alcohol and have women’s genitalia exposed.  The law may have had to do with pubic hair, but that would imply these women had pubes.

Rick and Little Joey are 20 years old and Tommy is 18, meaning none of them are of age to drink.  Rick had been getting anybody he could to buy alcohol for him, whether it be a 21-year-old friend or a person entering a gas station he managed to talk into helping him out.  He was desperate for livation.

“We’re here, you assfuckers.  YEAH!” Yells Rick.  The car buzzes with excitement and a massive cloud of cigarette smoke.  Little Joey rolls a joint with some regular weed.  Joey and Tommy get high.  Their mouths drying out and expelling hacking coughs.  They all light one more cigarette and make their way through the parking lot.  Joey’s eyes redden deeply, but Tommy’s are fine.  

They present their ID cards to the heavy-set man sitting behind the Lexan--a type of bulletproof glass.  He looks them over carefully and they each pay the $15 cover out of Rick’s money.  They can hear the thumping music leaking through the door.  The man stamps their hands and they push open the door and enter.

The club is hazy with cigarette smoke.  The black lights show off some embarrassing stains on Joey’s pants.  He hasn’t changed or washed them in weeks.  There are three connected, tiered stages.  The women rotate, with a new woman entering on the lowest stage.  The women strip their clothes off on the first stage and are completely nude on the next two.  All three stages contain a pole, of course.  Dim light strips line each stage.  Patrons can sit around any of the stages, or at a table further back.  The stages are lined with refrigerators, customers can use these to keep their drinks cold.

Rick, Joey and Tommy take a seat around the third stage.  A thin, white woman with curly brown shoulder-length hair gyrates and writhes around on the stage.  Her vagina is pierced and the barbell through it contains a flashing red light.  It is quite a spectacle.  “Walk” by Pantera crunches over the PA system.  Rick hands each of them $15 in singles and keeps $25 for himself.  They all place a dollar on the stage.  The woman crawls over to their section of the stage and brushes the money onto the stage.  She leans over and squeezes her breasts onto each of their faces, the scent of coconuts lingering on their skin.  Tommy and Rick have erections.  Joey is successfully fighting his back, although with great difficulty and concentration.

A blond woman wearing a g-string bikini approaches the three friends.  She offers them a lap dance.  Rick one-ups her and takes a private dance.  She leads him up a staircase into a room with a row of seats, each separated by a dividing wall.  She begins her dance as “Head Like a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails starts to play.

Tommy and Little Joey are watching a black woman with braids dance on the stage.  She is jiggling her bottom, but not to the music.  Tommy and Joey discuss sexual conquests which never happened.

“I fucked this one bitch so hard in the back of my car.  I accidentally honked the horn,” Joey says laughing boisterously.

“That is too fucking funny.  I fucked this hot bitch once in my parents’ basement, man.  It was, like, fucking amazing.  She sucked my dick and everything,” Tommy lied.
The woman on stage continued her dance, and put the crack of her butt against the pole, to separate her cheeks.  A few men whooped.

Meanwhile, Rick was still getting his private dance.  The dancer starts by facing away from him, and shaking her bottom from side to side in time with the song, lowers it halfway to the floor before popping it back up quickly.  The she lowers her butt onto Rick’s lap.  Rick’s erection throbbed.  She turns to face him and grinds her crotch against his, and places her breasts in his face.  The song ends and she offers him another dance, which he accepts.  The next song was “Dragula” by Rob Zombie.  This dance continues with the grinding, which is all Rick wants anyway.  They were dry humping.

Tommy and Joey continue to place dollars on the stage in trade for breasts on their faces.

“Man...tits are awesome!” Tommy exclaimed.  Joey agreed.

The woman on stage was on all fours, raising and lowering her butt, showing off her bald vagina.  Joey and Tommy stared and each place a single dollar on stage.  The song ends, and so does Rick’s private dance.

“That will be $80,” the stripper said.

“Oh, okay.  I’ll have to get it from my friends,” Rick said, knowing they would not have it.

Rick approaches Tommy and Little Joey and in a hushed voice says, “Okay, we need to go to the ATM.”  The ATM is located between the doors to the outside and the doors to inside the club.  They agree to go with him.  Rick takes out his driver’s license and puts it where the ATM card would go.  “Okay guys, on three we run to the car.”  Joey and Tommy don’t even have time to react before Rick starts counting.  On three they sprint toward the car yelling a string of profanities.  

Tommy fumbles with the keys to unlock the door.  They’re frantic.  Tommy speeds out of the parking lot, though nobody is chasing them..  Joey keeps looking out of the back window to make sure nobody is following them as they speed down the highway.

“What the fuck happened, asshole?”  Tommy asks.

“I got a blowjob!” Rick says, lying.

“Yeah right, you fucking faggot.  You probably gave her a blowjob!” Joey says and then gives Rick a high five.

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Dissolution

By Bub 

They were the first things he saw when he entered the classroom. The sleek black top of the science room table they sat on really brought out their stark and severe, yet forgiving beauty. He set down his suitcase behind his desk, hung his coat on the back of the chair and then stood there fixated on their hard, sharp angles. The slow gradation of slopes were contoured to welcome the palm's embrace. The shiny reflective metal of the undercarriage that brazenly forced you to reckon with your your own self-image; was contrasted with paint finish that was warm and unsanctimonious. The one had a familiar gray, the very same shade that colors the preponderance of your grandmother's hair. The other, an almost-pastel brown with infilled paneling designed to look like wood, evokes in you a longing for a simpler time that you haven't actually experienced.

He imagined their lives - sullen years of mass-fastening packets on igneous rocks and Newton's lesser laws. Waiting and toiling. Waiting to toil. Sometimes toiling to wait. All the while heartsick for a life they would never know or at least never know again. If only they were in the study of a beautiful mansion they might then be putting the finishing touch on a movie script that is funny, heartwarming, and self-aware. Maybe they might have been taken to a corner office in a major metropolitan sky-rise they would be at this very instant be sealing the deal on a business transaction with millions or even billions of dollars at stake. Or perhaps they would have been happy somewhere up in the New Guinea highlands living amongst clan-based societies securing mosquito nets and preventing malaria. So much of their time must be consumed by considering all that might have been.

And now here he was, about to add to their misery. These wonderful creatures; rotting. And he was there to help them rot, or at least to not embarrass anybody by mentioning it. He could not stand it. He grabbed a geode from a nearby table, then dashed the two staplers to mangled bits in front of a confused and and alarmed class of sixth graders.

As soon as he'd finished someone knocked on the classroom door. He dropped the geode and went over to the door to answer in a hushed tone. "Yes? Hello?"

"Oh, hello there. I'm a transport specialist for the Staple-a-Wish Foundation. I'm here to pick up your staplers."

"Staple-a-... I don't understand. What do you mean?"

"Well sir, for a few lucky underprivileged staplers, our organization makes their dreams come true by granting them one wish! The staplers in this room here were selected in a special lottery last week at Staple-a-Wish headquarters in Costa Grasa, Florida to grant the wish they submitted."

"My god..." guilt and anxiety began to overwhelm him, "what... was... their wish, if I may ask?"

"Sure, let me check my clipboard." He continues while checking his clipboard, "If my memory serves me right... it was a pretty simple one... OK, here! They both requested to be 'dashed to bits by the geode that had been kept just out of reach'. Says here they want me to pick up the remains".

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Goldfish

By Bub 

Younis Abdullah returned to his apartment to find his family had been murdered. Mother, wife, son, all gone. He had felt a rush to his head, for an instant not unpleasant, then dizziness, then everything went black. If Younis had been home instead of buying fish-shaped crackers at Price Club he might have been able to spare all their lives in exchange for his. Gaddafi had done this. Younis had protested the regime, even gone so far as to publicly burn the little green book. Now he had paid the price. He later wondered if it was worth espousing such seemingly righteous ideals literally at the cost of everyone he loved. If all of his political goals could have been realized, in exchange for losing his family, would he still have chosen to pursue them? He did not know. But these internal challenges he now found fanciful. It was too late to examine his life. Everything was gone. It was taken in the name of evil - that is what he came to accept as true. That simplicity made it remotely bearable. He was right, and he was wronged. And he took his only solace in that.

He fled to Egypt and was welcomed there and even celebrated for his liberalist credentials. He followed his passion and enrolled in a graduate program at American University in Cairo, and was even elected chairman of a local branch of a new liberalist political party. He took these roles very seriously, and seldom thought of his family that was murdered. Only on summer days when the temperature breached 40 degrees Celsius would unwanted memories intrude of laying blacktop in Libya to raise enough money to afford the down payment on his wife and his first car together. When he flipped past a cartoon on television between news stations, he would briefly think of the times when his mother called him in sick from school to stay home and watch Zeina & Nahool with him and snack on boiled dough balls that they would dip in date syrup. And at least once every other night he would miss the smell of his son around eight o'clock when he would normally have put him to bed after playing a game of hide and seek. Otherwise he made his best effort to focus on his studies and his role in his new community.

Then his blood stopped working. First, he began suffering from depression for suppressing his emotions about the trauma he had experienced. He began to imbibe in the alcohol that his new home in Egypt offered. Finally he became sedentary - he was functional, he did the things that were expected of him - but any time when nothing was expected of him he sat in the same chair and felt depressed while not acknowledging it and usually drank. Then one day he went to get out of his chair to attend a scheduled political meeting and he fell to the ground - blood had clotted in both of legs and all the way up to his abdomen and when he got up those clots stole the blood that was meant for his brain and he lost consciousness.

He went to the hospital. They performed surgery and removed the clots. There turned out to be hundreds of them. He took two weeks to recover, but he did and he was released. Younis went back to his school and to his political party ready to resume a life with meaning. Things were so bad that his own body had turned against him, or at least given up in light of the circumstances. But now he was better and was expected to continue life like it was the same thing he had imagined it was.

He tried very hard to do that. He completed his study in Egypt and was hired on at the university as an Assistant Professor. He even took a position at a liberal arts college in Missouri, USA as a Visiting Scholar. He taught an introductory course in macroeconomics. He even liked it in America though some of his students were openly hostile to him due to their xenophobia and racism. He had to look up the meaning of the term 'nigger' after he discovered "sand nigger" etched into his classroom podium. He was not as offended or humiliated as the perpetrator had intended.

But his blood kept clotting. The doctors told him it was terminal. He only had four months to live. He sat alone for a day and then decided to spend the rest of his fleeting life doing the one thing he unequivocally enjoyed - kicking a soccer ball against a wall. It was his main form of entertainment for many years as a boy. He loved the freedom of it. There was no structure. There was one rule - kick the ball against the wall. It could be as rigorous or mild an activity as he wanted. He appreciated the constancy of the ball's reaction to the various velocities of kicks. It was fun. He enjoyed it. He enjoyed it so much he continued to do it for days without stopping. The local people became enchanted with him. Fans would spontaneously appear and give him Gatorade and candy bars and other items purchased from the nearby gas station. Soon the media was alerted and local news station vans arrived to provide on location coverage at noon, six and ten. Mayors from towns in three counties visited to view the spectacle and either condemn or praise Younis. An area art class made a giant paper-mache puppet of Younis that they brought to the the site to cheer him on. Numerous calls were made to the Guinness World Records company, though they declined to send out a field representative.

Younis was oblivious. His condition was deteriorating. Once people became aware that he preferred Diet Coke to water that became all they offered. He only interacted with others when he was ready to intake nourishment to attempt to carry on his futile chore. He slowed down. His carriage drooped. His eyes sunk into his skull as if he'd died already a long time ago. He began to dizzy, then hallucinate. A Goldfish cracker was flying through the air, thrown toward his open mouth as Younis took his dying gasp. He felt a rush of blood to his brain, then the cracker bounced off of his forehead. Everything went black and he collapsed. He died of dehydration, kicking a soccer ball against a wall, hallucinating that he was watching cartoons with his son and wife and mom.

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Feldspar

By Bub 

Ronnie Mopples lived in Feldspar, Arkansas with his wife Marta. Feldspar, Arkansas was just across the border from Kentuckytown, Missouri where Ronnie worked at a combine assembly plant. Ronnie was proud of those three things more than anything, publicly at least. There was one more thing he was proud of, but this thing he had to keep quiet because he knew what it'd do to people if they knew. Ronnie was telekinetic.

Ronnie loved magic since he was a kid. But right about the time growing up when Ronnie learned that wrestling was just for show, he found out that magicians weren't real either; that it was mostly queers doing it like Siegfried and Roy, and David Copperfield. He threw away the magic set he got for Christmas along with his Rowdy Roddy Piper and Jesse Ventura action figures. He didn't want to trick anybody. He wanted to make a little red ball disappear, and then reappear under a cup, for real. He wanted to cultivate actual magic powers. So he began to practice.

He would sit at his kitchen table for hours; after school; on weekends; over the summer, and try to move things with his mind. He'd start with the refrigerator and work his way down in size to the ceramic cookie jar shaped like a mushroom that had a picture painted halfway down its stem of a bunch of little mushrooms that looked like it. Ronnie would continue to work his way down all the way to individual toothpicks in the rooster shaped toothpick holder on the kitchen table. Then he'd work his way back up to the refrigerator and start all over. Most of his friends from before stopped hanging around Ronnie, but a few would come over and sit with him every now and again and they would stare too; trying to move things with Ronnie. He grew into a teenager, and then a young adult practicing his technique. After a while his friends would need to let out their pent-up, sharply-focused, energy by shoving over sleeping cows and kicking them while they were down in the mud or smashing in rural mailboxes with batons. Ronnie would stay home, though. And he would keep practicing.

After high school, Ronnie, along with about a third of his graduating class, got a job at Regional Harvester Works in Kentuckytown doing piece work on combines. Regional Harvester was the only major employer in the tri-county area where you weren't covered in some animal's blood for your whole shift. It wasn't easy work though. And through normal channels of attrition - getting fired; quitting; quitting to sell real estate; quitting to sell painkillers, then meth; motor vehicle accident death; death by alcohol; hunting accident; murder - Ronnie's friends from high school that were still working at RH were whittled down to three: Ray Dowergrass, Skip Matheny and Dip Dobson. Those three would come over to Ronnie's every Sunday afternoon to stare in the kitchen with Ronnie until a football game peeled them away one by one, or in the summer when one of their girlfriends would get bored and set up ladder ball out in the front yard. Ronnie called these social interactions 'club meetings' - meetings of the Mind Over Matter Club. His friends went along with it as a running joke and eventually, like a running joke that is carried on long enough, the joke part slowly evaporated until they forgot there was ever a punchline.

Marta was Skip's younger sister. Skip started to bring her to club meetings after she quit high school because he didn't want her hanging in bars with the Hondurans from the turkey processing plant. She fell in love with Ronnie despite her brother always making fun of him. She fell for him because he was dedicated and measured - she knew he'd be a good father and all she really wanted was to be a mother; and also because secretly she believed he was supernatural. They got married the August after she started coming around.

Ronnie realized he'd become telekinetic one day at a club meeting when he was focusing on a bottle of Hamm's that was near the edge of a kitchen counter. And even though he was expecting invisible arrows to shoot out of his eyes like that little girl from that book, he didn't feel any, but he did feel a slight vibration go through his body, then 'CRASH'! The bottle laid mangled in a pool of its own foam on Ronnie's dirty kitchen floor.

"Damn it, Ray! Stop slamming the fucking refrigerator door! Look what you did to my beer!!" Skip yelled.

Ronnie shot a knowing glance at Ray who had just retrieved his own bottle of Hamm's from the fridge, then shifted his eyes over to Marta, then Dip, then Skip.

"Ray didn't have anything to do with it, Skip. I did that. With my mind. I felt it and I did it. I finally did it Skip. Hell, I'll buy you a whole 'nother case of Hamm's. I'll be able to buy us all enough Hamm's to last the rest of our lives!!"

Marta squealed with excitement.

"You fucking idiot, Ronnie. Ray slammed the door and caused the bottle to be knocked off by itself, not you. This whole Mind Over Matter thing is bullshit, I thought you knew that."

While everyone sat in silence, Skip considered collecting on Ronnie's offer of a case of beer. He thought better of it and announced he'd had enough for the night. Dip got up without saying anything and followed Skip out the door. Ray chugged his beer while fondling his girlfriend's shoulder. Then he belched and said to Ronnie, "Ronnie, don't take ole Skip to heart. We all know it's bullshit, but we have fun anyhow." He looked at his girlfriend and made a nodding motion toward the door. She sat there smiling at him. "Well, get the fuck up then," Ray said in what he thought was a playful manner. They left

Ronnie sat at the kitchen table while Marta cleaned up the broken beer bottle mess and went to bed. He now knew the devils that would be freed if people found out about his powers. He had better keep a tight lid on his newfound power or lord knows the wrath he would face. He sat for a couple more hours thinking about the devil, and wrath, and then he joined Marta in bed. That was the end of the Mind Over Matter Club.

Some years later at the harvester works Ronnie suffered a horrible injury. He and Skip, and Ray, and Dip, and four other guys were lifting a giant feederhouse up onto a jig so that they could repair one of the chains inside. Skip joshed Ronnie, "Hell, what you need us for? Why don't you just teleport this thing by yourself?!" Ronnie was sure that he could, but only gave a tight, sporting smile. They lifted the monstrosity up and when they went to set it down, one of the other fellas that was next to Ronnie, Gary, yelled to him to make damn sure to watch his fingers. Ronnie did. But Ronnie was in an awkward position and had to straddle an abutment and when they set the thing down it crushed Ronnie right between the legs. Ronnie howled like a meth addict that had just had a miscarriage. The team of men lifted the feederhouse up and Ronnie stumbled into the bathroom. He came out a minute later, while the rest were still in shock or confused as to what had happened, holding himself. "Ronnie, you alright?!" asked Skip. "My balls are black and blue, and my dick is bleeding out of both sides."

Ronnie was off work for four months. The doctor said he would be sterile. Marta stopped believing he was supernatural. She left him for a Honduran she had met at the gas station as soon as he was well enough to go back to work. Ronnie became depressed, stopped going to work. He lost his job, eventually his house. He moved in with his grandparents. He tried to kill himself by eating a dozen bananas and taking a half bottle of vitamins. He had heard somewhere that too much potassium could kill you. It didn't work. He was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. One of the patients told him that if he didn't have anything, he wouldn't have anything to lose. That patient just mimicked Bob Dylan lyrics all day, and followed that one up by saying derisively to Ronnie, "It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe" and then, "The handmade blade, the child's balloon..." Ronnie was struck by the first insight, though

When he was released, after he was determined to no longer be a threat to himself or others, he went back to his grandparents' house. But this time he slept in an old tub outside that had been stood up on its side behind the garage for decades. He learned to eat dandelions and acorns and to drink rainwater. He stopped thinking about his old life. He stopped trying move things with his mind. He became content. Skip would stop by once a month or so and visit with Ronnie's grandparents. They'd sit on the back porch smoking USA Gold cigarettes, look toward the garage and mutter, "It's a shame," back and forth to each other.

Eventually Ronnie became tormented by the devils. In his lonely hours he would accidentally think about them. He could no longer stand concealing his special power. He came up with a plan to prove to the world that he had this power and that he deserved all the reverence that he had imagined was in store. He would need a box of condoms, a syringe, and a dozen eggs.

He climbed out of his tub in his tattered Looney Tunes t-shirt and his jeans that were so stiff from being repeatedly rained on and sun-dried that they crunched with every movement, and he headed off towards the CVS/Pharmacy where he knew he could find all three items on his list. He was so enthralled with purpose that his vision became tunneled, his jaw slack, and his arms outstretched. He limped at an awkward but steady pace sending children in his path screaming and crying for help. When he entered the CVS the commerce inside ground slowly to a halt until the store became a frozen moment in time that only Ronnie had free access to. He slinked to the back to get a syringe, then to the grocery isle to get the eggs, and then went right behind the front counter to retrieve the condoms. He was met with no objections, and left without acknowledging anyone.

His brain was boiling in ecstasy. He couldn't hold it in, so he went directly to the bushes outside the store. He crawled in between the two biggest ones, slid off his pants and applied a condom to his erection. When he finished, he removed the condom and sucked out the sterile semen with the syringe, and then injected it into one of the eggs. He repeated this process eleven times over the course of two and a half hours until the entire dozen embryos were ready. He closed the egg carton and clasped it with both hands. He shut his eyes tight and concentrated with all his power until he felt a shudder from deep within himself. That's when he knew it worked. He had successfully impregnated chicken eggs with his own sterile human sperm. He picked up the egg carton and took off running, not even bothering to put back on his pants. He had no time for that; he needed to get to an incubator before some devil tried to stop him.

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Runaway Train

By Bub 

“I am not a faggot,” Dolton said nervously to himself. He had been preparing for the exercise for days. He scoped his route. He timed the traffic – luckily for him there hadn’t been any. He knew every potential witness in the neighborhood by first and last name and he knew their hopes and dreams. Dolton had gotten the total execution time down to under sixty seconds. This had taken several dozen practice runs in his basement all while listening to the cassette single of ‘Runaway Train’ by Soul Asylum on repeat.

He had dressed the part, too. No one would call him faggot wearing his grandpa’s WWII Navy outfit. And that was exactly the point. He wasn’t a faggot. Yet Jerold Hulger, the teenager from across the street had spray-painted a message stating the contrary on Dolton’s door. Dolton observed this brazen act in the middle of a Saturday afternoon from his window while he was enjoying his elaborate train set in the attic. Dolton lived by himself, off of the insurance money from the death of his mother, so the message had to have been intended for him.

He had avoided the boy for years after Jerold once showed him his box of knives that he kept in the garage for the inevitable Chinese invasion. But his avoidance was mostly because he felt he knew too much and didn’t want to be implicated when he got the chance to switch allegiance to his new Chinese overlords. In reality, Dolton had a crippling fear of the world and everyone in it - especially of those that rode BMXs, had girlfriends, and spray-painted graffiti on peoples’ houses.

He hadn’t been outside since his mother’s death. His groceries were delivered to his front porch. At night when he would go to sleep he would cry, not out of grief but out of a sense of the depth of suffering and fright that plagued every direction outside of his house all the way around the globe back to his front door. Now even his door was not safe.

“I am not a faggot,” he reassured himself one last time before he set his clock for 3 a.m., cried, and then fell asleep. When the alarm went off Dolton fluidly got out of bed, retrieved his grandpa’s hunting knife from the lock box and braced himself at the front door. He surveyed the neighborhood for activity - loose dogs; wandering drunks. It was all clear. Dolton burst out of the front door, sprinting, his kerchief ends flapping flamboyantly in the breeze. He ran up the stoop to the Hulgers' front door and unsheathed the knife. He engraved the words, "Kilroy was here" in half-inch letters while violently mumbling “This is for grandpa!” and “Who’s the faggot now?”

After he finished he turned to prance back home. He had been so focused on executing what he’d practiced that he didn’t notice the car approaching. It nearly hit him as he ran out into the middle of the street, then froze – caught in the headlights. The car stopped and the police officer inside squinted at Dolton for quite awhile trying to take in the shaky, knife-wielding man-boy in an antique sailor’s uniform. Finally Dolton sneezed, regained his composure, and completed the run.

Dolton scramble into his house fifteen feet from where the police officer watched, confused. No lights came on in the house. The police officer eventually shook his head and drove off. After the neighborhood was still once again a faint noise could be heard:

"Runaway Train, never going back
Wrong way, on a one way track
Feels like I should be getting somewhere,
Somehow I'm neither here nor there"

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Miller Time Metamorphosis

By Bub 

Demetrius got ready to go out to Miller Time. It was Thursday night – Karaoke night. He never sang karaoke. He left that to the faggots and the bitches. When his buddy Buzz would be all fucked up and scream out a version of Fat Bottom Girls, Demetrius would hoot and crank one hand in a circle in an approximation of what he imagined enjoyment looked like. He sprayed a generous portion of Axe body perfume down the front of his pants and directly onto each of his nipples. He then put on his party shirt, the one with shiny black and purple vertical stripes, placed his pointer and middle fingers next to each other, parallel, kissed the tips, and touched them to the mirror roughly where the corner of his right eye had been reflected. He was ready to Go Out. The smell of pussy was in the air, and he was a pussy-hound fresh on the scent. He had no idea that the transformation within him had already begun.


He closed the driver side door to his 2006 GMC Envoy XL as something urgent struck his memory. “I forgot my truck-nutz,” he said to nobody. He went back inside, grabbed the Awesome Fuckers, threw them onto the hitch, and got back inside the vehicle in one fluid series of motions. He started the engine. The radio came on:

I can feel my life is changing, Changing. I can feel my heart is jaded, Jaded. Left the sticks, Left the stones, Words don't hurt, Mend the bones. I can feel my life is changing.

“I fucking love Mudvayne,” Demetrius thought aloud. He pulled out of the driveway, turned on his head lights and drove into the dark.

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Doolin was waiting in his driveway when Demetrius pulled up. He started speaking before Demetrius opened the car-door.

“Hey D, where the fuck you been man? I’m almost too high to even go out. ALMOST!!!”

“What the hell are you yellin' about?” Demetrius said as he turned off the radio and shut the door.

The look in Doolin’s eyes at the sight of him said that he would not be answering this question.

“Fuck, man” Doolin said in a grave tone “Someone must’ve spiked my shit yo. It looks like you’ve got fucking antennas or some shit coming out of your head. I must’ve smoked some angel dust or something.”

“Heh!” Demetrius chortled “Then we’re about to have a great fucking time! Pack a hitter of that stuff before we go.”

“Alright man, but this is seriously kinda weird.”

Doolin packed the hitter and handed it to Demetrius. Demetrius lit it and began sucking in before turning back to the SUV and entering while holding his breath. Doolin got in as well. Demetrius exhaled exaggeratedly and Doolin let out a nervous laugh.

“Those fucking antennas look real, dude, like life-like or something, like in a movie, Independence Day or whatever, Hancock.”

“You are a riot, kid,” Demetrius said as he had heard adults say the phrase growing up. “I don’t have any fucking an-TANN-as, you stoned-ass fucker.” But indeed he did. And he would know this if he hadn’t recently punched out his rear view mirror when he missed a squirrel he had swerved to hit. They pulled away from Doolin’s house and headed towards town, towards Miller Time. Demetrius grabbed a USA Gold cigarette from a pack wedged between the sun-visor and the ceiling. He held it out toward Doolin like a fencing sword.

“No thanks” Doolin muttered without looking in Demetrius’s direction.

“Whatever man… fucking an-TANN-as… dipshit”

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

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By the time they got there The Change was almost complete. Doolin had glanced over at Demetrius several times during the ride there and had noticed his friend becoming increasingly vermin-like, but for the sake of his own credibility, chose to keep quiet. He looked out his window instead and thought about how crazy the stalks of corn looked.

Demetrius now had the body, head and legs of a cockroach, but the arms of a human. He felt nothing change, and was unaware of his circumstance.

He parked his car next to another car that had just pulled in. When trying to exit, Demetrius’s door hit the door of the car in the next parking space which had opened at exactly the same time.

“What the fuck man, what’re you some kind of…” The passenger from the next car shouted before catching a glance of Demetrius. Once he did, he tried to compute the information but couldn’t. His brain seized up as if to say it was all over, there was nowhere to go, anymore. He was a roof-top worker, had been in the sun all day and this incident made his skin feel sunburned. After a very long pause he whispered the only word his subconscious could force out, “…nigger.”

Demetrius intended to express his feeling deeply injured at being incorrectly labeled a derogatory racial epithet, but could only produce a rattling hiss, not unlike that of a rattlesnake, but with a chorus of locusts amplifying the noise. When he made this sound the tortured look on the tanned gentleman’s face let Demetrius and Doolin know that something incredible was occurring. The racist jumped back into the car and began crying. Doolin and the driver of the other car took off, running for their lives.

Demetrius stood still a moment, confused. Then he held his arms out in front of him, saw the bristly paws where his hands had been, and understood the situation. He was a cockroach now. And it was going to be much harder to score some pussy.

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Tales From Kentuckytown: A Fucking Awesome Night

By Katy

Ed Hill had been cruisin' the loop for hours. It was now nearing 9:00 and most of the town's 13-year-old girls had headed home to fight with their mother's about their maturity level. Without any sweet passengers to score, Ed decided there was nothing left to do but find his bros and get wasted. He rounded the end of the three-block drag and headed to the largest of Kentuckytown's five trailer courts.


On the way, he lazily searched his pre-sets for something tight to jam to. After skipping over Bette Midler, Bruce Springsteen, humming along with a few bars of "All the Small Things" and passing by The Police, Ed reached over for ICP's The Amazing Jeckel Brothers.

"BITCH! WHAT THE FUCK?! What are you trying to do to me? You wasn't true to me. When I was locked up you fucked something like 34 guys."

Ed was just syncing up with Violent Jay's raw rhymes, his 12-inch subs nearly blowing the windows off the Cavalier as he rolled into the park. He pulled up to lot 142, staying in the car an extra few second so the blast from the bass could alert Jon he was there.

"Hey man, shut that shit off! I don't want the fuckin' neighbors callin' the 5-O!" Jon was leaning out the storm door, wearing nothing but a dirty pair of gray sweats. A half-smoked cigarette hung from the side of his mouth and his hair was slicked back with the oil that had accumulated from three weeks without bathing.

"Shut up, motherfucker, you fuckin' puss," Ed stammered as he crawled from the Caviler and hopped up the steps to enter what was considered a ritzy single-wide trailer.

He walked into the living room and flung himself on a pile of newspapers, strewn over the couch.

"Who the hell is this fucker?" Alex said with a smile as he entered the living room from bedroom. "What up man, where have you been?"

"Shit, dude. I was just cruisin' downtown. Stopped at the park for a while to shoot the shit with Mike and Ryder. Those little fuckers think they're so tough."

"They're just fags, man," Jon piped in. He walked into the bedroom and emerged moments later with a bag and a box of aluminum foil. He plopped down on a chair near Ed and went to work grinding and rolling, constructing the prettiest thing Ed had seen since he'd played pool earlier with 15-year-old, Lindsey Allison.

"Yo, dumbshit, bum me a square!"

Alex dug into the pocket of his Jncos and threw the pack of Pall Malls straight at Ed's face. "Get a job, fuckass." Alex was only sixteen (four years younger than Ed, and five years younger than Jon), but kept in cigarettes by scoring them out of the carton in the freezer when his old lady passed out for the night.

"I already have a job showing your mom a good time," Ed laughed, hacked, and laughed again. If Alex had retorted he blocked it out. He just stared straight ahead and alternated between cigarette and pipe, while he thought about Lindsey. Sure, she was only 15, but that bitch was askin' for it. Next time he saw her he'd have to give her a beer or invite her back to Jon's to hang. He trailed off into a daze of preteens, booze, and Slipknot lyrics while he took another rip.

* * * * *

An hour later Ed got off the couch and staggered over to the fridge. He desperately searched for a beer, or anything to keep him from being alone with his own thoughts. Any thought.

"Goddamnit Jon. All you have in here is Sunny-D!"

"Chill dude, my mom just called and said she was on her way home. Bitch'll prolly have a 12-pack with her," Jon went back to watching a re-run of Walker, Texas Ranger, and ignored Ed.

Ed went back to the couch and realizing with no thoughts and no alcohol, he'd have to entertain himself somehow. He went back to the kitchen and grabbed a frying pan off the counter. He walked with an air of pretentiousness over to Alex and hit him flat on the head with the pan.

"Ed! What the fuck, man!?" Alex flinched away farther onto the floor.

Ed hit him again.

"Dude," Alex started to sob and looked to Jon for help, "Get him the fuck off of me!"

Ed started laughing and went to hit Alex again, but paused above his head. "Dude, you're a little fag." He threw down the frying pan., proud of his homemade entertainment he went off towards the bathroom to take a leak. He could hear Jon telling Alex to stop fucking crying; he didn't allow pussies into his home unless they were attached to tits.

Ed shook off and felt funny. He realized he felt a little remorse for hitting Alex for the sheer sake of amusement. The kid kept him in cigarettes, after all. Ed was suddenly overcome with a horrible feeling. What if this means I have feelings for Alex? Ed started at himself in the mirror and called himself a faggot for five straight minutes until the remorse had subsided. Once again feeling good about himself, he returned to the living room just as Jon's mom was getting home.

"I'll take those for you Cheryl," Ed grabbed the 12-pack and went to set it down in the kitchen.

"Don't think you're drinking all of that again, you lazy fuck," she yelled after him. "You can have two or three, after that back the fuck off."

Ed laughed off Cheryl's idle threats. He knew he'd probably just fuck her later to shut her up and to keep the beer comin'. He sat back down on the couch, looked around him, and felt wonderful about where he was. Just another fuckin' awesome night in Kentuckytown.

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Tales From Kentuckytown: Taylor's First Day of School

By Jake

Kentuckytown high school was a one-level building that housed slightly over 1,000 students during its hours of operation. Among the otherwise entirely white student population were one black and two Hispanic teens.

Winter break had just ended and Taylor had moved to Kentuckytown. He had been there for two weeks, but had barely left his house. Taylor was six feet tall and wore dark rimmed glasses, not unlike those of Weezer frontman, Rivers Cuomo.


Taylor had spent those weeks holed-up in his bedroom listening to Straight Outta Compton by NWA, Eazy-Duz-It by Eazy-E, The Chronic by Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle and Ice Cube's Amerikkka's Most Wanted. He had grown up in a predominantly black neighborhood and had never had a white friend, although he was white. He was very nervous about his first day of school.

“Taylor, you have to leave now,” his mother yells up the steps.

“Suck my dick, ma,” Taylor shouts back as he ties his shoe laces.

Taylor's mother was aggravated, but remembered her days in the early 80s as a punk. She even had he Crimson Ghost (the logo that was appropriated by the band the Misfits as their logo) tattooed on her upper right arm. She let Taylor slide. Maybe she did too often.

Taylor made his way down stairs. On his way out the door his mom handed him a $5 bill and gave him a kiss on his cheek. He gave her a look of love disguised as disgust and thanked her.

“Taylor, pull up your pants. You look like a fuckin' idiot,” she barked at him on his way out the door. He just laughed.

As he sat in his car picking out an album to listen to he thought about how his big pants were going to make him popular. The bigger the pants the better the chance of getting friends, he thought. That's the way it was back at his old school. He put in Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die and sped off toward school with butterflies fluttering in his stomach.

He opens the mud brown door in the east wing, and heads to his locker. He rummages through his enormous pockets, but can't find what he's looking for.

“Fuck I can't remember my combo,” he says to himself before heading down to the office to get a reminder.

The woman in the office, a secretary, glares at him as he enters the door. Her scowl is the kind that creeps across older people's faces as they wonder what's the matter with kids these days. His giant pants, his white A-shirt (what the kids call a “wife beater,” named so because of the use of the t-shirt in the 1950s by men who commonly practiced spousal abuse), his swagger. Everything about him rubbed this woman the wrong way. She gave him his locker combination and was glad to see him exit. She immediately told anybody around her what she thought of him-- none of it nice.

Taylor goes back to his locker and puts in the combination. He fills the barren locker with pictures of his heroes: Biggie, Dre, Snoop, Tupac and Ice Cube. His pants are hanging very low and you can see the upper half of his black and red flannel colored boxers. Some people walk by snickering.

Brittany Murphy, one of the most desirable girls in school, comes up behind him and pulls his pants down. She runs off to her group of friends, who are bursting into loud, boisterous laughter.

Taylor embarrassingly pulls up his pants as fast as possible. He tightens his belt around his waist. No boxers showing now. “Fucking stupid ass ho...” Taylor mutters to himself, the words slowing drifting off into the near emptiness of his locker.

Mike Flores shoulder bumps Taylor as he is walking to class, spilling his books on the floor. Taylor bends over to pick his books up. This day is going awful so far and he hasn't even had a class.

“Watch were yer fuckin' going you dumb faggot,” Mike chortles at him.

“I'm no fag, asshole,” Taylor exclaims.

“You look like a fucking nigger wearing those big nigger pants,” Mike retorts.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” Taylor says getting right in Mike's face. Mike's breath is a mixture of sour milk and cigarettes.

“Let's take this outside and settle this like men, dipshit.”

“Yeah, why fucking don't we, you chumpass bitch,” Taylor's heart is pounding ferociously, adrenaline is pumping through him at an alarming rate. His fist is tight and his knuckles are turning white.

The bell rings and everybody runs to class. Taylor and Mike go their separate ways.

Classes come and go. Nothing of note happens to Taylor in any of these classes. The teachers make him introduce himself in a couple of the classes and he gets bits of paper and erasers thrown at him. Otherwise the classes go pretty well.

Lunch is a disaster for Taylor; he sits by himself and eats a corndog and some fries. He is becoming depressed so he puts on his headphones and listens to some Tupac. As “Hail Mary” rings through his head he begins to get pumped up. He's got a fight on his first day of school. His mom is going to be disappointed, but he can't let Tupac down. He's listening to the realest shit Pac's ever written, he's got to be real, too.

Before the end of lunch Taylor pockets a fork. He walks back to his locker. Rick Rutherford passes him by and spits on him. The spit lands on the right lens of his glasses. Taylor cleans it off using his shirt. He just swallows his anger and walks away.

“Nice one Rick,” says Tom Jones, one of Rick's farmer friends.

“You're fucking right that was nice. I can spit a piece of shit out of an owl's asshole,” Rick brags.

Taylor gets to his locker and grabs his books before heading to his final three classes. The bell rings and he's back to his locker to put his books away. He's heading home. He walks outside and a small crowd has gathered.

“Nice of you to show up, wannabe nigger,” Mike says while laughing to himself.

“Shit! Fuck you man,” Taylor says as he holds the fork in his pocket tightly.

Mike walks up and takes a swing at Taylor, landing one right in his ribs. Taylor pulls the fork out of his pocket and drives it deeply into Mike's ribcage.

“You queer piece of shit.”

Mike has a blood stain forming on the section of his shirt where he was stabbed. He's clutching his wound at first, but soon his adrenaline is kicked into overdrive. He grabs Taylor by the throat and punches him in the face, knocking him to the concrete. He jumps onto Taylor, pinning him to the ground. He grabs Taylor by the sides of his head and begins slamming the back of his head into the concrete.

“How's that feel, cocksucker? You're big fucking nigger pants can't save you now,” Mike is making the crowd feel a little uncomfortable at the level of his aggressiveness. Some of the people are now starting to leave.

“You fucking like this you nigger-loving stroke?”

Finally, a teacher comes and breaks the fight up. They are both taken to the principal's office. The principal suspends both of them for three days. Taylor is dazed. He has no idea what is going on and his mother has to come pick him up.

“Taylor, what the fuck happened?” she asks him.

“Fuck ma, I have no clue. I just think from now on I'm going to wear some regular pants, if that's okay.”

“I'd love that. Let's go to Wal-Mart and get you some.” And they did.

After that Taylor just blended into the crowd and secretly listened to Biggie and 'Pac. Whenever asked what kind of music he listened to he'd always say something like Coldplay or Radiohead. Kids just shrugged and carried on about their business.

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Tales From Kentuckytown: Rick Rutherford's Dream

By Jake

Rick Rutherford awoke to the sounds of roaring thunder. He glanced over to the clock to see it was only 3:00 AM. "Fuck this shit, man," he thought to himself as he closed his eyes to go back to sleep.

He fell back to slumber seven minutes later.



Rutherford entered the REM phase of sleep. His mind began to show pictures. He was dremaing. He never remembered his dreams when he woke up and it pissed him off.

His dream:

"You fucking stroke," screamed Rutherford as he launched a water balloon at a five year old girl who was riding her bike down the street in front of his nice country home. The little girl's scream was so shrill that it was barely covered up by Rick's the uproarious laughter. "You fucking douche," he thought to himself while tears streamed down his face.

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Rick took his shirt off and headed over to his pool. He was sweating and had just gotten down oiling his tractor. His tractor rolled a lot smoother now and Rick was pleased. He decided to reward himself with a refreshing dip in the pool.

He dove in, at first the cold water was a shock to him. Then he felt his body go numb. "Fuckin' fuck of a goddamn rattlesnake cunt," he thought to himself, "I shouldn't have dove head first into this motherfucker."

He was right. He landed on his neck and was suffering from a stinger. He couldn't move his body and his lungs were beginning to fill with water. "Donkey shit, what am I going to do?"

In bed he was tossing and turning. This dream was extremely vivid, he usually doesn't have vivid dreams like this. To him it felt very real.

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He started gasping. He jolted up from bed. "Oh holy mothershitting hell," Rick said with an escaped breath. He looked over at the clock again, the time was not 4:17 AM. "Fuck it, I'm going to watch the fucking TV."

He went to the basement so he wouldn't wake his family up. If his dad woke up he might be angry and punch Rick in the head again. The last time he watched TV this early Rick's dad knocked him unconscious.

Nothing was on TV. He didn't really feel like watching TV much. He glanced over to his left and saw his dad's gun cabinet. "I'm going to shoot me a fuckin' can or two."

Shooting cans is Rick's greatest hobby. Sometimes he goes on the internet and logs onto ICQ under the name Rutherfordfairlane, but he doesn't respect the computer like respects cans and guns. He heads out the door with a rifle in tow.

He walks behind the barn and set some cans up on a tree stump. A few of them were beer cans that Rick and his ex-girlfriend Thea Vidale drank one night last August before they had their first awkward sexual encounter. Thea had asked Rick to stop after one pump, but he said "Fuck you, bitch" and pumped three more times until he came. There was a trial, but Rutherford's father was pretty powerful in the town--he had the biggest farm, after all-- and Rick got off. He was very lucky. Thea and her family moved out of Kentuckytown shortly after that.

This passed through Rick's head as he began to unload on the cans. A huge smile beaming like the rays of sunshine that were beginning to peak from the horizon. "Take that you sroke-assed cans," boom boom. "Take that Thea, fuckin' slut," boom boom.

He hit two of the cans, and five remained standing. "Not fucking bad at all," he thought to himself. He went back inside and fell right back to sleep. This time he didn't dream. He didn't need to anymore. Most of the dreams he didn't remember were about shooting cans. This time he lived his dream.

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World's Greatest Grandpa

By Brad

He bursts through the door, hands in air, yelling "where's my kiddies at?". Huckleberry and Susan run out of their playroom with grins from ear to ear. "Grandpa, where have you been?!? We have missed you sooo much!" says Huck. "Well.......I had to leave on a trip, but I am back now, no need to worry!" replied Pappy. Pappy kneels down on his left knee to give his two favorite grand kids a big ole' hug. "Now stay away from my right knee kids, you know how sore it gets on cold days like these." Pappy had 2 screws and a pin in his right knee from a Nazi grenade blast that almost took his life on D-Day.


"Huckleberry, where did you get that shiner from?" Asked Pappy in a Grandpa like tone. "I got it from Lou Gerhig, the school bully, he punched me in the eye for calling him a boner." "That son-of-a-bitch!" Exclaimed Pappy. "He's gonna fuckin' get it, just like I gave it to Hitler back in '43." Pappy stormed out of the house in a blind rage, hopped in his Lebaron, and sped off without even a goodbye to his two beloved kiddies.

Pappy pulled up to his double wide with a screetch of the tires. He climbed out of his car, and headed inside to his bedroom closet. He pulled out his vintage M1 Carbine. "Where the fuck did I put my bayonet?" He said with a crackling voice. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the sparkle of his highly shined bayonet. "Sweet, sweet baby, I've been waiting for this day" said Pappy. He attached the bayonet to the end of his M1 Carbine, and headed towards the door.

Mid-Monday, after a hard night of drinking and calculation, Pappy arrives at Horris Grant Elementary School, on the southside of Kentuckytown. He takes a large swig of his Cabo Wabo Tequila, Produced by the rocker Sammy Hagar, and heads toward the cafeteria doors. Pappy busts through the double doors and yells "Lou Gehrig, where the fuck are ya!" The Cafeteria goes silent as 124 puzzled school children look Pappy's way.

A young girl explodes from the bullet of the M1 Carbine. Pappy yells "Who's Next?" reminiscent of Stone Cold Steve Austin's rebel yell. Pappy takes a stab with his bayonet at a tramatized 6 year old, who has spilled his orange juice down the front of his new white shirt. The bayonet rips through his neck, shooting blood onto Pappy's trousers. By now, the children have realized what is happening, and their screams fill the cafeteria.

Pappy awakens in a pool of piss on the floor of his trailer. Shaking and trembling, Pappy realizes what he did to those school children during World War 2 was a crime and not just "War". George Bush arrives in Kentuckytown in Air Force 1 and gives Pappy a pat on the back, and with a twinkle in his eye says "You truely are the World's Greatest Grandpa."

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