Nit-tastic Tales
08-10-2016
, 02:35 PM
10-15-2016
, 11:49 AM
All right. I made my usual mistake of trying to end everything in one part. So let's recap.
Currently, Truestoryteller is simply crushing it with his The story of The Home Game. If you like good writing and you haven't seen this thread yet, you need to check it out.
Natamus is also rocking an excellent, well-written thread here.
It's a good time to be surfing BBV.
So, taking these guys' lead--rather than waiting--I'll post an installment now, and then post another in a few weeks. Going forward, I won't write that it's the end until my post says -The End...um...at the end.
PART IV: The Beginning of The End
This Magic Moment:
I was hanging out in back of the mall by the dumpsters, enjoying a smoke, when a kid walked up to me. "Excuse me," he said. "Can I ask you a question?"
"What?" I said at him, thinking that he--like half the denizens of Las Vegas--was out to cadge a cigarette.
"It's just that...I mean...are you young, or are you old?" I gave the kid a closer look. He seemed normal enough.
"Neither." I told him. "I'm 33."
"But your hair..."
...halfway down to my ass, and as white as the driven snow. "The hair's real. But I sprayed a can of stuff into it." I took one last long drag off my cigarette and said, "Gotta go. Buncha folks waiting for me in there." I stamped out the butt, turned and popped into the back room of my bookstore. I shut the door behind me, and then I put on my robe and my wizard hat.
I almost stepped out onto the sales floor without my long white beard. I found it in the bathroom and hooked it onto my face. Then I hoovered up a medium blast of the crystal meth for luck and, on the way out, I grabbed the book, one of the Harry Potters, here on the first day of its rollout.
Stepping out on to the sales floor I received a small cheer and scattered applause from a dozen or so kids and parents who'd been waiting for someone to show up and read to them. I flourished the book and gave everyone a little bow, making my best effort not to sniff or rub my nose. My eyes tracked a small white grain as it leaked out of my nose and bounced off of my great flowing beard, and from there it separated and dropped into the blue carpet like an iceberg calving from a glacier into the cold, cold sea.
I gathered my robe around me and sat on a bench below a paper mache Whomping Willow. And there I began to read out Harry's latest adventures.
On the night before this I'd spent several hours with Karime, a theater major friend, practicing the fake English accent I'd be using for the day. At around 3 AM I'd come back inside after a smoke to find Karime crashed out on her couch. She was probably faking sleep by that point. I'm sure she'd grown sick of coaching me on the accent. Tweakers never tire of doing anything. Usually something a lot more interesting has to come around to get them to stop doing the original thing.
I paused my reading for a moment and tried to cast a benign glance around at my young charges. I noticed that the kids and grownups had a thin translucent grey liquid sheen sweeping across their exposed skin, flowing purposefully over them all like a living mercury. Dust mites. The dust mites typically started to show up on people after I'd been awake for two or more days.
I realized I'd been staring into the middle distance for a bit long, trying to think the dust mites away. "How are we doing so far?" I asked the kids' upturned faces. A little girl stood up and raised her hand. "Can Moaning Myrtle come read for a little bit?" she asked.
"Moaning Myrtle will absolutely read for you." I said. "Are we all okay with that?" Everyone was fine with that. "Everyone remain here if you will and Moaning Myrtle shall arrive here in just a moment."
I stood up and quick-walked up to the storefront as fast as my robes would let me. Moaning Myrtle, aka Cheyenne, was greeting customers at the entrance. I handed her the book. "You're up," I told her.
"All right!" Cheyenne slapped some flyers in my hand and grabbed the book and bounced towards the back of the store. I heard a small cheer go off when she got back to the kids and parents.
I stepped to the front of the store and put myself in the path of a mother in her late 30's and her young boy. "I see you've brought your Muggle." I said to the boy. The boy looked at me, looked at his mother, and laughed. The mother did not laugh. Not at all. She had read the books and obviously did not appreciate the reference. She put her hand on the boy's left temple and gently steered him around in a tight arc and out of my store. I retreated to the back room for a consolation crystal blast, and then I marched myself back out to the sales floor.
I put myself on cash register duty, where I thought I might cause generally less PR damage. A few minutes later the mother and her young boy showed up again by my register. I'd caught her out of the corner of my eye and I noticed that she'd been waiting in line specifically for me. I started to sputter out an abject apology, but the growing puzzlement on her face stopped me. Here was neither the lady I'd called a Muggle nor the Boy who Laughed. It was a different mother and child.
"So," she began, choosing to ignore my wrong-footed apology. "Tyler would like to have your autograph in his book. He's a big fan of yours."
".....?"
"Because of you leadership, um role?" she prompted.
".....?"
"At Hogwarts?"
"Oh of course I am!" I said, having kept up with my phony British accent despite having forgotten its purpose. "So...?"
"Tyler"
"Tyler, have you done well with your studies this year?"
I paid no attention to the boy's reply.
"Very good! Excellent work! Let us have the book, then." Tyler handed me his copy, fixing me with a gaze filled with unalloyed awe and respect--all of this in spite of my amateur meth-addled shenanigans. The sharpie shook in my hand. What the hell was I going to write?
"Just a little something from his hero." coaxed his mom, trying to talk me down. I buckled down, then, sticking my tongue out the side of my mouth like Jordan airing the rock in from the free throw line, I put the sharpie into play.
The Night Climb
That night, instead of going home after work, I showed up at my old manager's apartment. Tom had scored some ecstasy and I was ready to roll after a long day of shaping young minds. Tom liked the meth as well, but he wasn't hooked on it like I was.
After a few hours, and a few drinks, and a few crystal blasts, and a few bong rips, the E started kicking in, and we got it in our heads that we'd like to go out for a night hike.
Red and white sandstone form the exposed backbone of the hills around Las Vegas. The rock is generally smooth to the touch, but it can also hold a decent grip. For the most part, it's fun to scramble up and down hills made of the stuff. 'Stay away from deathfalls,' had always been our main rule, so we'd never felt need to bother with safety equipment.
One of our favorite hills was in the Calico Basin, out next to Red Rock Canyon park. The hill, pictured below, is a quick, fun climb, and it's outside of the national park loop, so it doesn't cost an entrance fee to get there.
Now, if you propose to climb straight up the front face, you'll run into steep cliffs around three quarters of the way to the top. They don't look like much in the picture, but they get bigger and steeper when you're standing beneath them. There is a technically easy-ish way up the ridge on the right, but you have to know exactly where you're going and hit the approach dead on, or you'll head off course and find yourself staring at a cliff face. The easiest route, by far, is up the left shoulder, just around the back of the hill.
On any clear night anywhere within 30 miles of Las Vegas, you'll have the lighting equivalent of a full moon outside. Regardless of the time of night, you can always see a few feet in front of you. I don't actually recall us climbing the hill that night, but I remember being up top. We were rolling hard by then, laughing and singing snatches of songs and generally carrying on. I remember being immersed in a sort of fuzzy aquamarine background light, like some sort of knockoff brand of Northern lights had fallen from the sky and blanketed the hilltop around us seven feet deep in neon bluish green.
So we jumped around on the rocks and wandered aimlessly and babbled to each other and to the neon desert night, until at some point I heard a sliding and scraping noise off to my right, where Tom was supposed to be standing. I scrambled over to where he had just been, and I heard his feet shuffling a few feet away, and a dozen feet down below me.
"I'm okay," he assured me.
"Dude! You have to come back up here with me. That's the front." His answering profanities told me he knew that all too well. I took off my pack and lay down flat on my stomach and levered one side of my torso out and down into the empty darkness in front of me. "Climb up and grab my hand." I said. "You can't go down that way. There's deathfalls down there."
"I can't get back up. It's too steep." he told me.
"No way you can go down the front in the dark."
"I don't have a choice." he said. I heard him start to pick his way down.
"Hold on, then. I'm coming down with you."
"No! Do not come down this way! Go back down the way we came up. Someone needs to...you know." I knew. Someone needed to make it down unhurt so he could call in the rescue when the other guy didn't make it.
I jumped from boulder to boulder headlong down the left-hand ridge, barely looking out for where I was going. In no time, I was down on the bottom, looking up, sidestepping back and forth, trying to catch sight of my friend on the slope. He had a white shirt on that night. I should have seen at least a glimpse of it. "Tom!" I called up the hill. "TOOOOOMMMM!" Nothing. No answer. No hint of movement, by sight or sound. Calm down, dude, I told myself. You got down here in record time. He's probably still up near the top. Give the man a goddamn minute.
"TOOOOOMMMM!" There is a small residential neighborhood in Calico Basin. One of the residents owned what sounded like at least a few dozen dogs. I woke up all of them. Their high-pitched baying and howling drowned out my calls for Tom. I flipped open my phone: full bars and plenty of charge. I called Tom's phone a few times. It went directly to voice mail each time. Dialing 911 was the next option.
When you're on drugs, when you're carrying drugs, when you've driven somewhere recently under the influence of drugs, not to mention plenty of alcohol--calling the cops is straight-up calling artillery down on your own position. Someone had better be dying. I stared at the phone, also thinking about rescue operations I'd read about; mostly about the bill, which would likely run into the low to mid-5 digits. It's not like we weren't being stupid, climbing hills out here in the middle of the night. I flipped the phone shut.
So, how would we split that bill? Had it been my idea to come out here? Maybe, but I wasn't the one who'd gone down the goddamn front of the hill at night into the goddamn deathfalls. We might be spending the night in jail too, as well. And that was never a cheap out. MAKE THE CALL YOU STUPID SELFISH DICK. I flipped the phone open, and I prepared to punch out the 3 digits that would almost certainly change my life for the worse.
A movement caught my eye. It was Tom in his white shirt, coming out of the dark like a ghost ship. He had not heard any of my shouting as he was climbing down; just the barking dogs and the adrenaline rushing through his head. As I said, you can see three or four feet in front of you at night out there. The dropoffs that Tom had had to contend with were more than just a few feet. To address that, he would drop his backpack down into the darkness and listen for when it hit. If the time between dropping and hitting was short enough to sound like a reasonable fall, he'd climb down. From there, he was obligated to crawl around on the lower slope, searching for his backpack, only to be forced to drop it down again off the next cliff. If it didn't sound like a reasonable fall; well, I don't think he had a plan for that.
In more than one spot Tom found himself hanging in the air by his hands from a ledge, fully stretched out, with nothing below his flailing feet, and there was nothing for it but for him to just let go and drop down into the darkness, hoping for the best. Once he'd finally made it down, he'd found me from my phone light winking on and off while I dithered over calling for his rescue.
That was our first and our last night climb. When I got home the light was coming up on a new day. I had both the day off and a (non-climbing related) idea for a new story. I poured out a small glass of whiskey, sat down at my desk,hoovered up a big line of the crystal and put myself to work on it.
The Editing Bug
Back in the 60's and 70's, a writer named Philip K. Dick turned out several well-regarded Science Fiction novellas, all of them while being ripped to his tits on speed.
;
I am not Philip K. Dick, but ideas for stories would come to me while I was tweaking. And by halfway through the day after our Night Climb, I'd knocked out 10-12 pages of especially good copy.
The plot, as far as I could see it, stretched off in a pleasing sort of synchronous beauty, like a braided necklace woven from musical notes. The theme was a heartbreaking journey through the human condition; the hero was someone just about everyone could identify with. Overlying it all was a vast conspiracy, played out over a mind-blowing story arc. Everything, every perfect point of meaning was consolidating into an overwhelming tapestry. I stopped writing for a minute. I stood up and I danced around like a crazy person.
I looked it over again, hardly believing my luck. Exciting as it was, what was down there could stand a quick edit; just a light pass-through, then I could set about banging out the rest of it. After that it would only be a matter of finding the right agent to help me rake in the fame and the cash. Only, the main problem with me and editing is that I like to edit. It's one of my favorite things.
I started with reading the piece over and over, changing a word here and there on each pass. Then a sentence would get cut, or be rearranged. Then a character would be changed, or cut altogether. And then the narrator needed to have his own arc, even if he wasn't a character in the story per se. And footnotes--there needed to be footnotes, with some of them going to other footnotes, like David Foster Wallace did in Infinite Jest. Now, what if I put a sidebar in, like Coupland in Generation X? And then we could have new, detached characters in the sidebar, sort of a postmodern Greek Chorus commenting on the action as it played out, only they'd be more like Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show.
The morning light of the next day hit the empty bag of speed on my desk around 6 AM, then slowly shifting over and finding me still hunched over my laptop. I was due in at the bookstore later that morning; time to hit the shower. All that remained of the 10-12 pages from the day before were three paragraphs of insanely formatted gibberish. I deleted the remnants and got myself ready for work.
Next: We're only at the middle of the bottom of the barrel here, heading down. Site Admin David Sklansky will stop by my store and see me at my worst, and I'll run into a couple of other interesting characters.
Currently, Truestoryteller is simply crushing it with his The story of The Home Game. If you like good writing and you haven't seen this thread yet, you need to check it out.
Natamus is also rocking an excellent, well-written thread here.
It's a good time to be surfing BBV.
So, taking these guys' lead--rather than waiting--I'll post an installment now, and then post another in a few weeks. Going forward, I won't write that it's the end until my post says -The End...um...at the end.
PART IV: The Beginning of The End
Spoiler:
This Magic Moment:
I was hanging out in back of the mall by the dumpsters, enjoying a smoke, when a kid walked up to me. "Excuse me," he said. "Can I ask you a question?"
"What?" I said at him, thinking that he--like half the denizens of Las Vegas--was out to cadge a cigarette.
"It's just that...I mean...are you young, or are you old?" I gave the kid a closer look. He seemed normal enough.
"Neither." I told him. "I'm 33."
"But your hair..."
...halfway down to my ass, and as white as the driven snow. "The hair's real. But I sprayed a can of stuff into it." I took one last long drag off my cigarette and said, "Gotta go. Buncha folks waiting for me in there." I stamped out the butt, turned and popped into the back room of my bookstore. I shut the door behind me, and then I put on my robe and my wizard hat.
Spoiler:
I almost stepped out onto the sales floor without my long white beard. I found it in the bathroom and hooked it onto my face. Then I hoovered up a medium blast of the crystal meth for luck and, on the way out, I grabbed the book, one of the Harry Potters, here on the first day of its rollout.
Stepping out on to the sales floor I received a small cheer and scattered applause from a dozen or so kids and parents who'd been waiting for someone to show up and read to them. I flourished the book and gave everyone a little bow, making my best effort not to sniff or rub my nose. My eyes tracked a small white grain as it leaked out of my nose and bounced off of my great flowing beard, and from there it separated and dropped into the blue carpet like an iceberg calving from a glacier into the cold, cold sea.
I gathered my robe around me and sat on a bench below a paper mache Whomping Willow. And there I began to read out Harry's latest adventures.
On the night before this I'd spent several hours with Karime, a theater major friend, practicing the fake English accent I'd be using for the day. At around 3 AM I'd come back inside after a smoke to find Karime crashed out on her couch. She was probably faking sleep by that point. I'm sure she'd grown sick of coaching me on the accent. Tweakers never tire of doing anything. Usually something a lot more interesting has to come around to get them to stop doing the original thing.
I paused my reading for a moment and tried to cast a benign glance around at my young charges. I noticed that the kids and grownups had a thin translucent grey liquid sheen sweeping across their exposed skin, flowing purposefully over them all like a living mercury. Dust mites. The dust mites typically started to show up on people after I'd been awake for two or more days.
Spoiler:
I realized I'd been staring into the middle distance for a bit long, trying to think the dust mites away. "How are we doing so far?" I asked the kids' upturned faces. A little girl stood up and raised her hand. "Can Moaning Myrtle come read for a little bit?" she asked.
"Moaning Myrtle will absolutely read for you." I said. "Are we all okay with that?" Everyone was fine with that. "Everyone remain here if you will and Moaning Myrtle shall arrive here in just a moment."
I stood up and quick-walked up to the storefront as fast as my robes would let me. Moaning Myrtle, aka Cheyenne, was greeting customers at the entrance. I handed her the book. "You're up," I told her.
"All right!" Cheyenne slapped some flyers in my hand and grabbed the book and bounced towards the back of the store. I heard a small cheer go off when she got back to the kids and parents.
I stepped to the front of the store and put myself in the path of a mother in her late 30's and her young boy. "I see you've brought your Muggle." I said to the boy. The boy looked at me, looked at his mother, and laughed. The mother did not laugh. Not at all. She had read the books and obviously did not appreciate the reference. She put her hand on the boy's left temple and gently steered him around in a tight arc and out of my store. I retreated to the back room for a consolation crystal blast, and then I marched myself back out to the sales floor.
I put myself on cash register duty, where I thought I might cause generally less PR damage. A few minutes later the mother and her young boy showed up again by my register. I'd caught her out of the corner of my eye and I noticed that she'd been waiting in line specifically for me. I started to sputter out an abject apology, but the growing puzzlement on her face stopped me. Here was neither the lady I'd called a Muggle nor the Boy who Laughed. It was a different mother and child.
"So," she began, choosing to ignore my wrong-footed apology. "Tyler would like to have your autograph in his book. He's a big fan of yours."
".....?"
"Because of you leadership, um role?" she prompted.
".....?"
"At Hogwarts?"
"Oh of course I am!" I said, having kept up with my phony British accent despite having forgotten its purpose. "So...?"
"Tyler"
"Tyler, have you done well with your studies this year?"
I paid no attention to the boy's reply.
"Very good! Excellent work! Let us have the book, then." Tyler handed me his copy, fixing me with a gaze filled with unalloyed awe and respect--all of this in spite of my amateur meth-addled shenanigans. The sharpie shook in my hand. What the hell was I going to write?
"Just a little something from his hero." coaxed his mom, trying to talk me down. I buckled down, then, sticking my tongue out the side of my mouth like Jordan airing the rock in from the free throw line, I put the sharpie into play.
Spoiler:
The Night Climb
That night, instead of going home after work, I showed up at my old manager's apartment. Tom had scored some ecstasy and I was ready to roll after a long day of shaping young minds. Tom liked the meth as well, but he wasn't hooked on it like I was.
After a few hours, and a few drinks, and a few crystal blasts, and a few bong rips, the E started kicking in, and we got it in our heads that we'd like to go out for a night hike.
Red and white sandstone form the exposed backbone of the hills around Las Vegas. The rock is generally smooth to the touch, but it can also hold a decent grip. For the most part, it's fun to scramble up and down hills made of the stuff. 'Stay away from deathfalls,' had always been our main rule, so we'd never felt need to bother with safety equipment.
One of our favorite hills was in the Calico Basin, out next to Red Rock Canyon park. The hill, pictured below, is a quick, fun climb, and it's outside of the national park loop, so it doesn't cost an entrance fee to get there.
Now, if you propose to climb straight up the front face, you'll run into steep cliffs around three quarters of the way to the top. They don't look like much in the picture, but they get bigger and steeper when you're standing beneath them. There is a technically easy-ish way up the ridge on the right, but you have to know exactly where you're going and hit the approach dead on, or you'll head off course and find yourself staring at a cliff face. The easiest route, by far, is up the left shoulder, just around the back of the hill.
On any clear night anywhere within 30 miles of Las Vegas, you'll have the lighting equivalent of a full moon outside. Regardless of the time of night, you can always see a few feet in front of you. I don't actually recall us climbing the hill that night, but I remember being up top. We were rolling hard by then, laughing and singing snatches of songs and generally carrying on. I remember being immersed in a sort of fuzzy aquamarine background light, like some sort of knockoff brand of Northern lights had fallen from the sky and blanketed the hilltop around us seven feet deep in neon bluish green.
So we jumped around on the rocks and wandered aimlessly and babbled to each other and to the neon desert night, until at some point I heard a sliding and scraping noise off to my right, where Tom was supposed to be standing. I scrambled over to where he had just been, and I heard his feet shuffling a few feet away, and a dozen feet down below me.
"I'm okay," he assured me.
"Dude! You have to come back up here with me. That's the front." His answering profanities told me he knew that all too well. I took off my pack and lay down flat on my stomach and levered one side of my torso out and down into the empty darkness in front of me. "Climb up and grab my hand." I said. "You can't go down that way. There's deathfalls down there."
"I can't get back up. It's too steep." he told me.
"No way you can go down the front in the dark."
"I don't have a choice." he said. I heard him start to pick his way down.
"Hold on, then. I'm coming down with you."
"No! Do not come down this way! Go back down the way we came up. Someone needs to...you know." I knew. Someone needed to make it down unhurt so he could call in the rescue when the other guy didn't make it.
Spoiler:
I jumped from boulder to boulder headlong down the left-hand ridge, barely looking out for where I was going. In no time, I was down on the bottom, looking up, sidestepping back and forth, trying to catch sight of my friend on the slope. He had a white shirt on that night. I should have seen at least a glimpse of it. "Tom!" I called up the hill. "TOOOOOMMMM!" Nothing. No answer. No hint of movement, by sight or sound. Calm down, dude, I told myself. You got down here in record time. He's probably still up near the top. Give the man a goddamn minute.
"TOOOOOMMMM!" There is a small residential neighborhood in Calico Basin. One of the residents owned what sounded like at least a few dozen dogs. I woke up all of them. Their high-pitched baying and howling drowned out my calls for Tom. I flipped open my phone: full bars and plenty of charge. I called Tom's phone a few times. It went directly to voice mail each time. Dialing 911 was the next option.
When you're on drugs, when you're carrying drugs, when you've driven somewhere recently under the influence of drugs, not to mention plenty of alcohol--calling the cops is straight-up calling artillery down on your own position. Someone had better be dying. I stared at the phone, also thinking about rescue operations I'd read about; mostly about the bill, which would likely run into the low to mid-5 digits. It's not like we weren't being stupid, climbing hills out here in the middle of the night. I flipped the phone shut.
So, how would we split that bill? Had it been my idea to come out here? Maybe, but I wasn't the one who'd gone down the goddamn front of the hill at night into the goddamn deathfalls. We might be spending the night in jail too, as well. And that was never a cheap out. MAKE THE CALL YOU STUPID SELFISH DICK. I flipped the phone open, and I prepared to punch out the 3 digits that would almost certainly change my life for the worse.
A movement caught my eye. It was Tom in his white shirt, coming out of the dark like a ghost ship. He had not heard any of my shouting as he was climbing down; just the barking dogs and the adrenaline rushing through his head. As I said, you can see three or four feet in front of you at night out there. The dropoffs that Tom had had to contend with were more than just a few feet. To address that, he would drop his backpack down into the darkness and listen for when it hit. If the time between dropping and hitting was short enough to sound like a reasonable fall, he'd climb down. From there, he was obligated to crawl around on the lower slope, searching for his backpack, only to be forced to drop it down again off the next cliff. If it didn't sound like a reasonable fall; well, I don't think he had a plan for that.
In more than one spot Tom found himself hanging in the air by his hands from a ledge, fully stretched out, with nothing below his flailing feet, and there was nothing for it but for him to just let go and drop down into the darkness, hoping for the best. Once he'd finally made it down, he'd found me from my phone light winking on and off while I dithered over calling for his rescue.
That was our first and our last night climb. When I got home the light was coming up on a new day. I had both the day off and a (non-climbing related) idea for a new story. I poured out a small glass of whiskey, sat down at my desk,hoovered up a big line of the crystal and put myself to work on it.
The Editing Bug
Back in the 60's and 70's, a writer named Philip K. Dick turned out several well-regarded Science Fiction novellas, all of them while being ripped to his tits on speed.
;I am not Philip K. Dick, but ideas for stories would come to me while I was tweaking. And by halfway through the day after our Night Climb, I'd knocked out 10-12 pages of especially good copy.
The plot, as far as I could see it, stretched off in a pleasing sort of synchronous beauty, like a braided necklace woven from musical notes. The theme was a heartbreaking journey through the human condition; the hero was someone just about everyone could identify with. Overlying it all was a vast conspiracy, played out over a mind-blowing story arc. Everything, every perfect point of meaning was consolidating into an overwhelming tapestry. I stopped writing for a minute. I stood up and I danced around like a crazy person.
I looked it over again, hardly believing my luck. Exciting as it was, what was down there could stand a quick edit; just a light pass-through, then I could set about banging out the rest of it. After that it would only be a matter of finding the right agent to help me rake in the fame and the cash. Only, the main problem with me and editing is that I like to edit. It's one of my favorite things.
I started with reading the piece over and over, changing a word here and there on each pass. Then a sentence would get cut, or be rearranged. Then a character would be changed, or cut altogether. And then the narrator needed to have his own arc, even if he wasn't a character in the story per se. And footnotes--there needed to be footnotes, with some of them going to other footnotes, like David Foster Wallace did in Infinite Jest. Now, what if I put a sidebar in, like Coupland in Generation X? And then we could have new, detached characters in the sidebar, sort of a postmodern Greek Chorus commenting on the action as it played out, only they'd be more like Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show.
Spoiler:
The morning light of the next day hit the empty bag of speed on my desk around 6 AM, then slowly shifting over and finding me still hunched over my laptop. I was due in at the bookstore later that morning; time to hit the shower. All that remained of the 10-12 pages from the day before were three paragraphs of insanely formatted gibberish. I deleted the remnants and got myself ready for work.
Next: We're only at the middle of the bottom of the barrel here, heading down. Site Admin David Sklansky will stop by my store and see me at my worst, and I'll run into a couple of other interesting characters.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 10-15-2016 at 12:13 PM.
10-15-2016
, 05:31 PM
12-06-2016
, 10:29 PM
12-07-2016
, 09:18 AM
12-07-2016
, 03:07 PM
12-07-2016
, 03:26 PM
12-07-2016
, 04:17 PM
It would work if you weren't gonna whittle it down to a grammatically perfect four words early in the AM...
12-09-2016
, 12:48 AM
12-27-2016
, 11:43 PM
12-28-2016
, 09:43 AM
01-20-2017
, 08:59 PM
01-21-2017
, 03:00 PM
02-01-2017
, 06:52 AM
All right. Here's one that's not so terribly tl:dr
Part V: Shipping the Nickels:
As the weeks and months passed and my meth addiction strengthened, my social life gradually deteriorated. Tom, my old boss and best friend in town, moved away to LA, and I couldn't be bothered to keep in touch any longer with our mutual friends, all of whom were great people who had taken me into their circle, and all of whom I let slip away after Tom left.
Instead, to fill up the time, I picked up a video poker addiction. Video poker is a big leak, even for a steady drinker with access to an endless fountain of the fanciest free drinks. You can find dozens, maybe hundreds of bars in Las Vegas that do perfectly well with having just two or three regulars in an otherwise empty joint...they turn a nice profit, as long as those regs are players.
VP and alcohol are a powerful combination to begin with. To add to that, VP and methamphetamine seem like they are made for each other. It seemed inevitable that I would be hooked in. The machines are everywhere in Las Vegas. It took five years of being a local, but I succumbed in the end.
But even at this low point in life, I couldn't stand putting my money in bad. I found a nit's compromise at the Gold Spike Casino's five cent 9/6 Double Bonus progressive carousel. Once I'd memorized the basic strategy, there wasn't much in cash that I could leak at those stakes. I tipped a dollar per drink, which was the gold standard for a nickel VP player, so the waitresses were always coming around for me. For many months during the height of my addictions, I spent my free time at the Spike for hours on end, snorting meth in the bathroom, punching buttons furiously and getting good and ****faced, and all without hurting my roll.
The royal flush on the DB 9/6 nickel progressive starts at $200. Early one night during a vacation from the bookstore spent going nowhere and doing nothing but getting drunk and tweaked out and playing VP, I walked in to the Gold Spike to find the royal progressive up to $430--a promising start. The carousel had 10 seats, and one of them opened up just as I walked in. I recognized the departing scarecrow outline of the former occupant as she shuffled off, having just gone busto again. She would soon be asking for change at the edge of the Fremont Street Experience, until the security guards moved her along. Bully for me, I had a seat now.
The next 8 hours passed like a fever dream at 720 hands per hour. I was hitting especially good that night, and more than keeping up. I was hitting regular four-of-a-kinds; good ones: low quads and aces. This was the era just before cashout tickets, so I'd twice emptied my machine of its nickels. Some of the other carousel regs were mumbling to themselves about my success. By 2 AM on that weeknight, the progressive stood at $550. Every seat on the carousel had been filled for hours, and other folks were sitting around just waiting for a spot.
That was when a sudden case of the chills poured down the back of my shirt, as if an AC unit had just cranked on to full power directly above me. I shivered, looked up, and I saw The Man making his way across the casino floor. I recognized him right away, and a wave of simultaneous terror and greed swept over me and took my breath away.
The Man in question was James "Whitey" Bulger. I knew him from a book I'd taken home from work. Bulger was a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. If I remembered the book correctly, the reward for information leading to his capture was up to $100,000. The last known picture of him had been taken more than 10 years before, but this was him. He was older, but just as offhandedly menacing as in the pictures.
I looked down and noticed that I'd already pulled out my phone and had flipped it open. After some quick thought, it didn't seem to me that 911 was the appropriate number for this instance. What if I was wrong? The cops would show up, and as per usual I was half-drunk and had drugs on me that I did not want to ditch. I had no number for the FBI, and cheap phone plans did not come with search engines back then. I thought that the FBI's Las Vegas headquarters might be right down the street but I wasn't sure.
Would anyone be at the building at 2 AM? Not to mention that Bulger had been very close with the Boston branch of the FBI before he'd gone on the lam. What was the story with him in Las Vegas? It could cost me my life to find out. Back East he'd been the FBI's number one informant there for years, and had gotten away with all kinds of terrible things in return for snitching on other mobsters, until he'd finally crossed the line with performing a number of murders--not all of them strictly business related--and two of them being women whom he and his partner had mutilated horrifically. I looked up from my phone and Bulger was staring right at me.
Previous to this moment, I'd worked in retail for 15 years of my life, and many of them at a register, helping hundreds of customers a day. So I have interacted with hundreds of thousands of different people, maybe a half million or more people. This man, Whitey Bulger, had the coldest, darkest, most terrifying stare I have witnessed in my life. This old, frail man, maybe 5'8" and 140 lbs (173 cm, 64 kg), fixed his gaze on me and scared me right down past my bones.
I dropped my eyes down, and I shut my phone and put it away. What did I want with $100,000 anyway? Even if I could collect--which wasn't a lock by any stretch--I'd keep maybe $60,000 after taxes. I knew what I'd do at that point in my life: I'd quit my job at the bookstore to tweak out full time, and be dead within 6 months.
I played for a few minutes, then I chanced a quick look back up and he was still staring at me. He hadn't moved an inch. Just so we're both on the same page here, his glare said to me. You are nothing but a spider in my bathtub right now. You think you might be able to hurt me, but you have no idea what you'll be getting yourself into.
I snapped my head back down and played for half an hour straight. It was a very long 30 minutes. It seemed like a day and a half. Finally, when I couldn't stand it any more, I looked up and Bulger was gone.
Some time past 2 PM the next day I found myself at least breaking even after more than 14,000 hands, through some minor miracle of variance. The royal progressive stood at $740: the highest anyone playing or hanging out there had ever seen it. Arguments started breaking out whenever a seat would open up. One of these arguments was in progress when I picked up a Kc and four junk cards. I kept the king and drew four perfect for the royal flush in clubs.
"BOOM. EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!" I yelled, without thinking, as my machine tootled out its 8-bit version of "We're in the Money." This was the only period in my life when I was prone to outbursts of yelling. I'm generally a quiet person. The stares I got from my carousel mates were priceless. I smirked back at them, each in turn. Hell, I had borne witness to the direct evil eye from Whitey Bulger. These losers had nothing on him.
Two slot attendants showed up and paid me off. I gave the attendants each a ten-spot, stood up, and fell over sideways, heavily, into an adjacent bank of slot machines, banging my hip on the low counter between machines.. "I'M OKAY." I announced. "I'M NOT DRUNK...I JUST...MY LEGS..."
I had been hunched on the seat fixed to the VP machine with only tiny bathroom breaks for 20 consecutive hours, and I hadn't felt the need for a break for the last 7 of those. My legs were shot. When I picked myself up and tried to walk, it felt like I was in my first week of trying out new prosthetics. Nevertheless, I toddled my way out of the Spike, waving away the security guards.
Out on the sidewalk, I made it about 50 feet towards the bus station before I realized that my legs were not getting better. I sat down on the sidewalk. Now, I owned a car and had a license and insurance, but the car was temporarily off the streets due to its expired and cancelled license plates from the previous owner not being good enough for THE PIGS, and from me not yet being arsed to register the thing properly.
It came to me that five years before I had crumpled down on this sidewalk no more than 100 yards from this place. Back then I'd been busto, my dreams crushed, and I'd been weak from hunger. "BUT JUST LOOK AT ME NOW!" I yelled, again, to no one. I closed my eyes and I laughed for a while.
After about 15 minutes of rubbing my legs and stretching them, the feeling in them returned and I was able to walk again. When I'd made it home, I hunted down my FBI 10 Most Wanted book. I flipped through to the Whitey Bulger chapter. It turned out that I'd remembered things wrong: there had never been a $100,000 reward out for information leading to Bulger's capture.
Part V: Shipping the Nickels:
As the weeks and months passed and my meth addiction strengthened, my social life gradually deteriorated. Tom, my old boss and best friend in town, moved away to LA, and I couldn't be bothered to keep in touch any longer with our mutual friends, all of whom were great people who had taken me into their circle, and all of whom I let slip away after Tom left.
Instead, to fill up the time, I picked up a video poker addiction. Video poker is a big leak, even for a steady drinker with access to an endless fountain of the fanciest free drinks. You can find dozens, maybe hundreds of bars in Las Vegas that do perfectly well with having just two or three regulars in an otherwise empty joint...they turn a nice profit, as long as those regs are players.
VP and alcohol are a powerful combination to begin with. To add to that, VP and methamphetamine seem like they are made for each other. It seemed inevitable that I would be hooked in. The machines are everywhere in Las Vegas. It took five years of being a local, but I succumbed in the end.
But even at this low point in life, I couldn't stand putting my money in bad. I found a nit's compromise at the Gold Spike Casino's five cent 9/6 Double Bonus progressive carousel. Once I'd memorized the basic strategy, there wasn't much in cash that I could leak at those stakes. I tipped a dollar per drink, which was the gold standard for a nickel VP player, so the waitresses were always coming around for me. For many months during the height of my addictions, I spent my free time at the Spike for hours on end, snorting meth in the bathroom, punching buttons furiously and getting good and ****faced, and all without hurting my roll.
The royal flush on the DB 9/6 nickel progressive starts at $200. Early one night during a vacation from the bookstore spent going nowhere and doing nothing but getting drunk and tweaked out and playing VP, I walked in to the Gold Spike to find the royal progressive up to $430--a promising start. The carousel had 10 seats, and one of them opened up just as I walked in. I recognized the departing scarecrow outline of the former occupant as she shuffled off, having just gone busto again. She would soon be asking for change at the edge of the Fremont Street Experience, until the security guards moved her along. Bully for me, I had a seat now.
The next 8 hours passed like a fever dream at 720 hands per hour. I was hitting especially good that night, and more than keeping up. I was hitting regular four-of-a-kinds; good ones: low quads and aces. This was the era just before cashout tickets, so I'd twice emptied my machine of its nickels. Some of the other carousel regs were mumbling to themselves about my success. By 2 AM on that weeknight, the progressive stood at $550. Every seat on the carousel had been filled for hours, and other folks were sitting around just waiting for a spot.
That was when a sudden case of the chills poured down the back of my shirt, as if an AC unit had just cranked on to full power directly above me. I shivered, looked up, and I saw The Man making his way across the casino floor. I recognized him right away, and a wave of simultaneous terror and greed swept over me and took my breath away.
The Man in question was James "Whitey" Bulger. I knew him from a book I'd taken home from work. Bulger was a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. If I remembered the book correctly, the reward for information leading to his capture was up to $100,000. The last known picture of him had been taken more than 10 years before, but this was him. He was older, but just as offhandedly menacing as in the pictures.
I looked down and noticed that I'd already pulled out my phone and had flipped it open. After some quick thought, it didn't seem to me that 911 was the appropriate number for this instance. What if I was wrong? The cops would show up, and as per usual I was half-drunk and had drugs on me that I did not want to ditch. I had no number for the FBI, and cheap phone plans did not come with search engines back then. I thought that the FBI's Las Vegas headquarters might be right down the street but I wasn't sure.
Would anyone be at the building at 2 AM? Not to mention that Bulger had been very close with the Boston branch of the FBI before he'd gone on the lam. What was the story with him in Las Vegas? It could cost me my life to find out. Back East he'd been the FBI's number one informant there for years, and had gotten away with all kinds of terrible things in return for snitching on other mobsters, until he'd finally crossed the line with performing a number of murders--not all of them strictly business related--and two of them being women whom he and his partner had mutilated horrifically. I looked up from my phone and Bulger was staring right at me.
Previous to this moment, I'd worked in retail for 15 years of my life, and many of them at a register, helping hundreds of customers a day. So I have interacted with hundreds of thousands of different people, maybe a half million or more people. This man, Whitey Bulger, had the coldest, darkest, most terrifying stare I have witnessed in my life. This old, frail man, maybe 5'8" and 140 lbs (173 cm, 64 kg), fixed his gaze on me and scared me right down past my bones.
Spoiler:
I dropped my eyes down, and I shut my phone and put it away. What did I want with $100,000 anyway? Even if I could collect--which wasn't a lock by any stretch--I'd keep maybe $60,000 after taxes. I knew what I'd do at that point in my life: I'd quit my job at the bookstore to tweak out full time, and be dead within 6 months.
I played for a few minutes, then I chanced a quick look back up and he was still staring at me. He hadn't moved an inch. Just so we're both on the same page here, his glare said to me. You are nothing but a spider in my bathtub right now. You think you might be able to hurt me, but you have no idea what you'll be getting yourself into.
I snapped my head back down and played for half an hour straight. It was a very long 30 minutes. It seemed like a day and a half. Finally, when I couldn't stand it any more, I looked up and Bulger was gone.
Some time past 2 PM the next day I found myself at least breaking even after more than 14,000 hands, through some minor miracle of variance. The royal progressive stood at $740: the highest anyone playing or hanging out there had ever seen it. Arguments started breaking out whenever a seat would open up. One of these arguments was in progress when I picked up a Kc and four junk cards. I kept the king and drew four perfect for the royal flush in clubs.
"BOOM. EVERYBODY OUT OF THE POOL!" I yelled, without thinking, as my machine tootled out its 8-bit version of "We're in the Money." This was the only period in my life when I was prone to outbursts of yelling. I'm generally a quiet person. The stares I got from my carousel mates were priceless. I smirked back at them, each in turn. Hell, I had borne witness to the direct evil eye from Whitey Bulger. These losers had nothing on him.
Two slot attendants showed up and paid me off. I gave the attendants each a ten-spot, stood up, and fell over sideways, heavily, into an adjacent bank of slot machines, banging my hip on the low counter between machines.. "I'M OKAY." I announced. "I'M NOT DRUNK...I JUST...MY LEGS..."
I had been hunched on the seat fixed to the VP machine with only tiny bathroom breaks for 20 consecutive hours, and I hadn't felt the need for a break for the last 7 of those. My legs were shot. When I picked myself up and tried to walk, it felt like I was in my first week of trying out new prosthetics. Nevertheless, I toddled my way out of the Spike, waving away the security guards.
Out on the sidewalk, I made it about 50 feet towards the bus station before I realized that my legs were not getting better. I sat down on the sidewalk. Now, I owned a car and had a license and insurance, but the car was temporarily off the streets due to its expired and cancelled license plates from the previous owner not being good enough for THE PIGS, and from me not yet being arsed to register the thing properly.
Spoiler:
It came to me that five years before I had crumpled down on this sidewalk no more than 100 yards from this place. Back then I'd been busto, my dreams crushed, and I'd been weak from hunger. "BUT JUST LOOK AT ME NOW!" I yelled, again, to no one. I closed my eyes and I laughed for a while.
Spoiler:
After about 15 minutes of rubbing my legs and stretching them, the feeling in them returned and I was able to walk again. When I'd made it home, I hunted down my FBI 10 Most Wanted book. I flipped through to the Whitey Bulger chapter. It turned out that I'd remembered things wrong: there had never been a $100,000 reward out for information leading to Bulger's capture.
Spoiler:
Last edited by suitedjustice; 02-01-2017 at 07:10 AM.
02-01-2017
, 10:41 AM