The Urban Spaceman wrote:...You should know that I'd given the key to the store owner along with my cash money, unintended, of course.
But that is the next chapter:
ZID: B&E into your own home.
Now for another Martini.
And here we go:
The traffic snakes screamed their siren song behind us as we left the non-intersection. We had crossed the paths of howling comets and returned to the other side unscathed.
My heart raced. My pulse pounded in my neck and I felt all trembly and shaken and stirred.
What would help me calm my mind? Of course, it was the nectar of the gods.
Only thing was: where the hell had I hidden that brown paper bag of beers?
Six hand grenades awaited, and it would most certainly be a salve for the burning brain, all alit from the ZID oddity that coursed through my veins. Yes, a paper bag the color of the desert silt. At one time, the desert had been the bottom of a mighty ocean, but now it was all dried out.
Fuck being Dry.
Joey ran ahead of me as I staggered about, reaching beneath various spiny plants with sharp teeth.
He returned with a small hip flask and opened it up. He guzzled and burped.
“Here” he said, and my eyes grew wide.
“Hah?!”
He nodded. He said, “this be rum.”
Rum indeed. It tasted like the kiss of a dark-skinned mistress from an island in the tropics. It tasted like I should visit this island, and put up a hut. I would live there forever, counting the stars each night as she soothed my racing mind.
With fortitude and renewed strength I remembered the location of the paper bag of cans. It was back near the intercourse. I was fucked. I did not want to venture back there. Too much going on there for a dizzy mind.
But do you witness, to leave a solder or six behind is abuse of alcohol.
I took another deep chug form the flask and coughed from its strength. I said to Joey, “Now don’t run off again!”
I ran back to the end of the sand trail that subsided with the mountain water canal and saw the plant that hid my treasure. Yes, it was under an agave plant, one that held court with arms a full three feet in length from its widening reach to the stars above.
Once again fully armed, I rejoined Joey and exclaimed, “Dude!”
He laughed and then he whispered, “Dude!”
I understood. I was hollering at ungodly hours. I recompensed. I said, “Dude.”
We staggered back with a beer in each hand and his hip flask and two more grenades in the bag under my arm.
Heaven under the starlit sky.
Home again, home again, jiggety jig.
We mad eit back in what seemed like a week, of giggling form the effects of the booze and the beers and the ZID, but do ya ken, it did not last for veyr long once we arrived.
I set the emtpies down and reached for my apartment key, but it was not there. It was not in any of my pockets, no matter how many times I rechecked. Joey scrambled through his own jeans pockets, and he had no key either.
A bird chirped in a tree off by the front of the apartment so I looked up. The sky held an interesting tint of purple off beyond the edge of the Sierra mountains to the east.
Oh no.
The sun was stretching his angry arms up, ready to claw his way out of his bed and scream at us for not getting our homework done.
I said, “Joseph, we will be caught by the neighbors in a little bit.”
He said, “Fuck them neighbors.” He twisted the door knob so hard that it broke off in his hand. I think that ZID can have that effect on your strength. THis did not help us. He chuckled. He said, “Guess I don’t know my own strength!”
Well, he was a rocky bullmoose there I tell you.
I gently pulled him aside and then I kicked that door with my boot.
The whole apartment complex echoed down the sidewalks as the door splintered but did not open.
I fell back on the ground and smacked my head. I saw stars.
Joey yarded me back up with brute strength for a little man, and then he kicked at the door.
It cascaded inward, and he pulled me in there alongside him.
Someone shouted from the bedroom. "WHAT THE FUCK?!"
Yup.
This was not our apartment.
This would be the
last time we ever made such a mistake.
.
