Thirst For Fire -- Incendiary New Fiction

“David Lee Roth has the best cocaine,” she said, her eyes at half mast, with the strings of dirty black yarn growing out of her head, in place of where her hair should have been, stuck to the inky mascara chunks congealed on her monster-sized, plastic eyelashes like a bad case of instant karma; “but he doesn’t share it unless he thinks you’ll fuck him.”

“I’d fuck him,” Sandra replied lazily, the drawl of the syllables lethargic and hollow now that her buzz was kicking in. A thin sheen of heroin sweat covered her exposed skin, giving her a preternatural glimmer. Her small breasts and huge, pink nipples juxtaposed awkwardly against salient and angular hipbones that just screamed sex to whoever was listening, from a hundred-story megaphone ten miles wide.

“I’d suck his cock…”

She was standing there smoking, adorned only by a pair of full bottom panties covered in cartoon strawberries, like the kind you might shoplift one day from a Target department store, if you were a mentally deranged, dead-broke junkie whore who got her rocks off by having overweight Mexican security guards chase you down the streets of Hollywood and holler at you in broken English until they collapsed panting and dry heaving in the dead weeds growing out of the cracks in the pavement. The day she stole them she actually had the nerve to walk back over to her hapless pursuer and pat him on the head, cooing a gentle string of dirty suggestions into his ear before laughing and skipping away. He clutched his chest, his face screwed up, and tried desperately to tune her out, but she had gotten inside of his head. She had won.

She always won. That was part of her trip, never losing, in spite of the fact that society classified her as a loser.

Drew could be equally psychotic. It was no mistake that these girls were best friends; they had drank each other’s blood under a full harvest moon when they were sixteen and had been hand fastened in a bacchanal orgy of lesbian sex and cheap wine, which is not something you easily forget. Since then they’d given up on pagan rituals and white Wicca, but not the trysts.

They claimed it kept them connected, telepathically speaking.

“…and lick his filthy, dirty, old, rock star asshole…”

Sandra got on her knees in front of me as if to suggest a demonstration was in order and I tried not to flinch. She was the Queen of punk-rock-points (PRP’s) and run-on sentences. She was our fucking idol, all of us, and she knew it, which only made her little tirades worse when she got wound up. You would have thought it was her idea to blow up the Beverly Center in the first place, but it wasn’t; it was something Drew slipped in my ear one night like a tiny poisonous insect, letting it crawl through my brain killing everything it touched along the way, until I thought I had come up with it on my own.

Sandra had tennis bracelets covering both of her wrists that she had made one of the local poseur kids buy for her at a Hot Topic store and bring back.

Puppy dog slaves to the High Queen Whore, that’s what she called them.

Sexless alter boys pumped up out of their fragile little minds on hormones and Sex Pistols was more like it.

The bracelets were made out of black felt with bright white skull logos sewn into it, like something you might buy from a Día de los Muertos festival on Olvera Street. They were trendy and stupid and totally unlike Sandra, but they covered the scars and kept her from having to explain one more time how she didn’t know why she kept cutting herself but that she was pretty damn fucking sure it wasn’t a fucking cry for help.

7 punk-rock-points for excessive expletives, especially in a single sentence, that’s just part of the game we play, the one where I don’t ever get to go home again.

She had on guy’s tube socks with bad elastic, their dingy gray ringed on top by two bands of color, cherry and lime Slurpee to be precise, and unlaced low-top Converse shoes; a dirty shade of faded black.

Her fingernail polish was chipping off, Urban Decay – Frostbite, showing glimpses of the pristine original nail beneath the purple paint. She wrapped her small arms and tiny hands around my waist as she spoke but she didn’t acknowledge me.

I tried to keep from getting an erection.

I wasn’t shocked that she’d fuck DLR.

Nothing she could have come up with back then would have surprised me.

She was always saying shit like that, and not just to get a rise all the time.

She’d actually do it if it came down to it, just to prove a point, to who the fuck I don’t know.

5 PRP’s for added profanity, straight to me and my soon to be high score.

“…and let his friends masturbate on my tits, bukakke-style…”

She was desperate to prove that nothing mattered, and that one action was just as pointless as another, and that beyond the fear and the terror and the horror of existence was just this meaninglessness that pervaded everything, and eventually it wore you thin until you surrendered to it or you went insane and suffered some great self-immolation.

“…and shove Jujubees up my ass…”

She absentmindedly played with her clit through her underwear while she talked.

I’m pretty sure I was rock hard by this point, but I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want her to figure out that all I could think of was her getting my shaft wet by licking me then stuffing me into the back of her soft throat while Drew watched.

Nothing mattered, true, but I could hear the blood pumping in my veins like an unseen symphony cueing up for a crescendo.

We were playing at being nihilists.

You have to understand that this is not entirely my fault.

I was born to fail them. It’s just in my nature, that’s all.

Sandra was born to be a fuck puppet, genetically predestined to swallow random lovely strangers DNA like it was a deliciously flavored lysergic, (she liked LSD-25), and while they moved on to fabulous lives she could never imagine knowing, she never tried to tag along for the ride.

One action was just as pointless as another she used to say.

She provided excellent service, according to the web reviews chronicling her “encounters,” as they liked to call them online.

She gave the GF-fucking-E: The “girlfriend” experience, which basically means that, if you want her to, she pretends that you really fucking matter, like someone would if they were dating you, instead of just being a cum receptacle for the rich and the spoiled and the lonely.

5 points for inserted swear word.

She was a wonderfully eccentric note in the texture of the upwardly mobile professionals sexual landscape, exotic and memorable, like sampling rare cuisine; a Suicide Girl escort or a pose-able punk rock Barbie blow-up doll in the flesh. Most of her clients dressed in Armani and left prepaid Amex cards on the dresser that she checked via cellphone or sometimes via wireless plug-in modem on her Toshiba portable before providing manual release.

She gave the big happy ending.

The toll free number for checking the total amount registered on an American Express Gift Card in America is 1-877-796-4678. Operators are standing by twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to answer your calls. Giving Sandra these cards meant that she couldn’t be traced by purchase. Sandra was a bit paranoid, even for a beautiful and intelligent junkie whore. Cash is also untraceable, as far as I know, but she didn’t like carrying it on her and she refused to get a bank account.

She was our fucking idol, seriously, and we dutifully listened to everything she had to say.

She used to make me laugh so hard that had I been drinking milk it might have shot out of my nose and for that I think she is absolutely priceless. She also bought me oatmeal raisin cookies after a security guard beat me up once in front of Turner Liquor for mouthing off to him, and that made me decide that I would love her no matter what she said or did until at least the last day of my life. She and Drew were both prepared to be by my side on that day. I just never knew how literally they meant it, or what they were honestly expecting of me.

Everything has a purpose that it is destined to fail at or betray. There is no other way this could have turned out.

“…while whistling Dixie with my cunt lips if he asked…”

Beyond the fear and the terror and the horror of existence was just this meaninglessness that pervaded everything she would say, like a personal mantra. We had seen it, come to believe in its resounding power, come to accept it.

It became the ultimate truth.

Most of her clients did not know that she was a junkie because they never looked close enough to the ink dripping down her otherwise porcelain flesh to see the tracks in the middle of the art. There was usually a puncture wound in the small hollow of her tiny right arm that she tried uselessly to cover with cheap Joe Blasco foundation, if you cared to look for it.

“…at least for the coke.”

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous,” Drew replied, her lips pulling into an abrasive and sexy sneer. She was brushing one of her frazzled, black licorice dreadlocks out of her face, away from her mascara, and snapping a bowl from a dirty blond bubbler she had stolen from the Lion’s Den head shop in Canoga Park. She lifted a lot of their merchandise before they went under.

“David Lee Roth is a fucking dinosaur. He looks like a cross between David Lee Roth and a fucking Muppet now.” She held then hit in as she spoke, croaking the words out before exhaling a long plume of green and blue smoke that circulated in the small, depressingly windowless, pink room we had taken over.

The building was abandoned, in the middle of Hollywood, on the boulevard no less, not ten blocks from the Scientologist’s Celebrity Center where Tom-fucking-Cruise went.

5 points.

The only way to get in was through a second story window that was boarded up with cheap plywood, but first you had to climb up the side of a fence and onto a ledge, then swing yourself across by holding onto a pole.

We slid the board back and crawled in to find office after office of abandoned desks, like a ghost world left intact or a museum whose sole theme was the working conditions prevalent in the late 20th century during the height of Capitalism.

Feel free to insert your very own ‘Office Space’ joke here. We sure did.

We nicknamed the building Hollywood Babylon Manor and overnight it became our center for anarchist operations. I took to scrawling it onto windows with a Sharpie, on benches, in wet cement…pretty much everywhere I could.

Hollywood Babylon.

We decided to strip down to our underwear because it was the middle of summer and the heat was just totally fucking overwhelming and there was no way to cool off. It wasn’t that big of a deal, since Drew and I had been fucking since the first hour we met (in the back bathroom of a Subway on Melrose) and Sandra was technically a call girl.

Drew immediately took another hit.

“I like the Muppets,” Sandra taunted. “Especially the one with the big long nose. I always thought he had something special to offer me. Imagine the possibilities.”

“Sicko,” Drew said, choking on a fat hit that quickly filled the room as she let it out. “Now you’re talking like some kind of a freaky plushophile. You’re not going system on us, are you?”

She was talking about Crass.

She was talking about furries.

She was talking but I stopped listening when I saw her eyes, and then her lips were just moving but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to them.

Her eyes were the color of cyanide flavored pop rocks, washed down with fizzy cherry Coke.

In my head a single thought kept repeating itself over and over like one of those insipid and banal sitcom commercials that follows you from station to station on the radio in Los Angeles.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

Her eyes were like two glossy candy suckers, the kind where the flavor never matched the color.

Sandra began to pretend to fellate me, her mouth opened wide, her shiny lipstick inches from my groin. I took a dollar out of my pocket and threw it at her. She acted shocked and thrilled by a whole one dollar bill just for her.

Drew laughed at us.

Her pupils were blown wide open, like bad politics mixed with pop culture at two in the morning when all you can think about is that you’re out of money and speed and you know you don’t really want to come down gracefully after all.

It played over and over in my mind, like a song hook, until the words became an unwanted, chalky Valentine candy heart with the inscription worn off the face, rolling around in an empty container, unpicked and unwanted.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

“What about Gene Simmons?”

“What about him?” Sandra let go of my ass with a squeeze and turned back to Drew, who was taking off her clothes.

“Would you fuck Gene Simmons for cocaine?”

“Don’t be disgusting,” she said, making an exaggerated face that suggested she might throw up.

“Why not? Why is David Lee Roth okay but Gene Simmons isn’t? What if he had a ton of great snow?”

“I may be a professional sex worker, but that man is a pig.”

“I thought you were a nihilist?”

“Call me Annie-fucking-Nihil baby.”

Add 5 points.

“I thought nothing mattered to you?”

“I’d fuck Sammy Haggar before I would let that greasy Dago lick my fuck with his possessed Satanic cow tongue.”

Drew slid off her bra and shook her freed breasts.

“That feels soooo much better.”

“So, since tomorrow we might all die trying to prove a retarded point about the uselessness of consumer culture, what do you want to do on your last day on earth?” Sandra asked, suppressing a giggle.

Drew smiled, her eyes coming up from Sandra’s beautiful face to meet mine.

“Let’s have sex, all of us…let’s fuck and fuck until we can’t fuck anymore and then lay around twitching until we fall asleep and the sun comes up.”

10-fucking-punk rock points to Drew for having the balls to say what we were all thinking, no doubt.

*** *** ***

Incomplete thoughts from my journal filtered through my head as I watched the sun creep through the windowpane and across the cold floor; totally non sequitur. I had taken a white, spiral bound notebook and scrawled across its glossy face with an indelible marker.

Random. Notes. From. A. Maoist. Anarchist.

I didn’t even know for sure what the words meant because more than anything they were Drew’s words. I didn’t bother to look up their definitions. I just thought it looked cool, subversive, contrary.

Whatever.

It was that same type of mentality that had attracted Drew to me in the first place, the posturing, so fake and transparent, but what else was there to do? Punk for the fuck of it. Nothing to rebel against. I raged out of my lack of injustice, an anemic subversion of conformity.

Where I grew up everyone has two point five kids. They marry young and divorce quickly and remarry right away. They go to church but don’t believe in religion. They vote Republican, no matter what the issue, and hope for the best.

Where I grew up everyone is working hard to be a clone of everyone else and though I couldn’t put my finger on it, exactly, I had been trying since early in my childhood, since I first saw the invisible bars of this nearly imperceptible cage of mediocrity.

Where I grew up everyone is working hard just to blend in with everyone else.

I took to spending weekends in the city, hitchhiking to get there, and returning by Monday morning to the family breakfast table as if nothing had happened. The ‘rents never once mentioned my little Houdini act, at least not to me. They liked to pretend to be blissfully unaware of my absences. My father used to talk about sports with me every morning over his grapefruit and dry toast. I would sneer at him and reply with an assumed English accent like I was Sid-fucking-Vicious.

2 points.

I was so fucking fake back then, but I had no guide to propel my anger and frustration forward, to channel it into something constructive that might make a difference in the world. This was before I even knew what it was that I was fighting against so desperately, before I had heard of Che and the Zapatistas and Chairman Mao. It was before Drew opened my eyes to the suffering occurring all over the world so that people like my parents and their friends could spend all of their lives in a false sense of security, eating steak dinners on the veranda and drinking martinis with the neighbors and playing eighteen rounds of fucking golf while talking on their new cell phones.

2 points, because it was too obvious.

I was hanging out on Melrose, two-toned liberty spikes gelled up with the dried fetus of gooey Knox Blox and pointing like church spires to high holy heaven, black fingernail polish, leather jacket with the Dead Kennedy’s Holiday In Cambodia album silk screened onto cotton then stapled securely on it with cheap studs, safety pins jammed through my ears and ripped, faded, stone washed jeans on.

I was one hundred and ten percent fucking poseur.

I was smoking DEATH cigarettes.

It was what caught her attention the first time she ever spoke to me. She came up to bum one.

I don’t remember a word of what she said to me.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

How could I resist you, Drew Groll?

We got high off some cheap weed she had and I stole a bottle of rum from a shop down near Vine and then she took me to meet Sandra, at her old apartment on St. Andrews, near Western, and I never went home again.

Just like that I made the decision to follow her from the quiet and peaceful existence I was rejecting in the suburban sprawl, that place where my middle class parents had built a dream home for themselves and raised me like a delicately nurtured virus, a test tube aberration, into the wretched belly of the inner city. Just like that I went from living the introverted life of a shy nerd to this extraordinary rebirth as a punk rock street urchin/speed dealer.

It made so much sense to me that it seemed like destiny, like I had been searching for it my whole life.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

The second time we fucked I told her everything, and she laughed at me.

I remember we were eating take-out at the time, greasy noodles with vegetables but no meat, because Drew’s a vegetarian.

I had never drank Thai Iced Tea and I was surprised by how sweet it tasted.

The bookshelves of her apartment were full of weird philosophy and conspiracy books I had never heard of before in my life. I read almost all of them before we got evicted, before we ended up selling them to a store up on Franklin near Birds for whatever they would give us, so we could eat and buy supplies to make sprack.

“You won’t last,” Drew said without hesitation.

“You’ll just crack one day and head back to the land of milk and honey where mommy and daddy love you,” that’s what she said to me.

“You aren’t cut out for this,” she told me.

“You’ll bitch too much.”

“You should go back to your local mall and beg them for a job selling motivational posters in expensive frames to yuppies, or making juice smoothies for cheerleaders and their faggot rapist jocko boyfriends.”

I never bothered to tell her that young urban professionals had largely given way to DINK’s when it came to being indiscriminately picked on; double-income-no-kids.

I never bothered to tell her that I had no plans of ever going home, that I could tell from the first time I kissed her that I wouldn’t ever be able to go home again, that nothing short of the end of the world would separate me from her.

The day the world ended I planned on being with Drew Groll.

I was Drew’s shiny new puppy and she knew it right away, so she started training me and teaching me how things in this world really work. She began preparing me for a life of urban terrorism.

I never bothered to tell her that I knew she was only testing me when she said mean shit to me. I smiled and gave her a practiced look and she’d smile too, and then we’d usually change the subject. We never talked about food when we were hungry, sleep when we were tired, or blowing up government buildings when we had just finished making love.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

It wasn’t always like this.

I wasn’t always an alchemist, turning Sudafed into pure gold with common household cleaners, selling super pure meth to hookers and street people and desperate West Hollywood queers, to fund our anarchist brigade.

I wasn’t always obsessed with monkeywrenching in my spare time like some pathetic activist on a rampage after reading Palahniuk’s Fight Club, playing ‘Project Mayhem’ by posting flyers in the middle of the night along deserted streets and vandalizing corporate coffeehouses like Starbuck’s for kicks.

We terrorized the parking structures in Beverly Hills, on Rodeo, super gluing the locks of new SL500’s or A6’s shut, dumping sugar into the gas tanks of 2005 BMW 5 Series no more than a few weeks old. Sandra shit in a Bentley Continental GT, on the driver’s seat, then took plastic gloves from a hair dye kit and smeared it all over the inside of the windshield. With the doors closed and the windows rolled up it must have gone to over a hundred degrees inside the car that day, spoiling the new leather with a smell that was guaranteed to never come out.

We penetrated the tall glass buildings in Century City late at night and demolished their pristine interiors, spraying the walls with obscene slogans, cocks and cunts, and stole sensitive corporate paperwork, then left it at the L.A. Times in-desk. We doused the carpets with hydrogen sulfide, smashing the flat screen monitors or drenching the insides of every computer hard drive in salt water and Coca-Cola, before slipping out undetected in the first rays of the morning sun.

Each successful mission propagated a bigger and more high profile mission.

We were totally obsessed with destruction.

“We are fighting them with their own weapons, eating them alive from the inside out,” Drew would say, and then I would quote to her from Audrey Lorde:

[“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”]

Then she would slap me and I would slap her back twice as hard and then we would start beating each other with our fists until we were on the ground. Soon we would be screwing ourselves, all of our anger, into one another. Sometimes Sandra watched us fuck with a detached look, as if we were a nature program she recalled seeing as a child, replaying on the Public Access Channel; or a porn movie from Eon McKai.

I didn’t used to live in such a kinky and sad melodrama, like a wilting flower hanging out of a melancholy book of unrequited love poems.

I used to be on the fast track to an Ivy League college.

I used to have a full head of hair, neatly coiffed with the strays on my neck trimmed close, instead of a blazing pink Mohawk.

I used to spend all my time surfing the Internet and talking in chatrooms instead of making bombs out of expensive luxury sports utility vehicles with diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate, but back then I couldn’t get a date with a girl to save my life.

I had taken to sneaking a lot of porn into my bedroom but could never really get into it because it made me feel bad to think of these chicks having to pose naked or get fucked by strangers for money. I’d close my eyes and desperately try to imagine my fantasy, to keep it intact, then open them again and look at the girl spreading her insides open so far you could almost see up into her lunch. No matter how hard I tried to close them out of my thoughts they kept coming back, the sad eyes embedded in those naked faces, and it would kill my mood. Eventually I would give up and my half-flaccid member would dangle sore and bruised and unfulfilled in front of me like a rag of flesh.

Everything is always in motion.

Ammonium nitrate fertilizer can be effectively used to stimulate the growth of both avocados and broccoli, just two of the fine products growing in Oxnard California, which is where we had to travel to steal a truckload of the stuff from Agro-Chem & Associates.

Everything is always changing, growing or dying.

Considering that the same type of material was used in the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, and all of the noise that everyone had been making about Homeland Security since September 11th, I thought it was going to be a lot more difficult to get our hands on, but it wasn’t. There was no one guarding it. There was no one monitoring who came and went on the property. It wasn’t even locked up. The hardest part of boosting it was having to shovel it into the back of the sports utility vehicle and onto the plastic bags we had glued to the insides of the stolen truck with duct tape, because it stunk and there was a lot of it.

With the rear seat down there is approximately one hundred and five cubic feet in a 2005 Cadillac Escalade. We packed every inch of it we could with fertilizer.

April 19th, 1995 was a perfect, sun-drenched Oklahoma morning in full springtime bloom. Against a picturesque deep blue, cloudless sky, a bright yellow Ryder Rental truck carefully maneuvered its way through the streets of an unsuspecting and blissfully ignorant populace in downtown Oklahoma City. Just after 9 am, the truck came to a stop in a parking area outside the Alfred P. Murrah Building. The driver stepped down from the cab and casually walked away. Two minutes later a deafening roar sounded as the truck’s deadly 4000-pound cargo bomb ignited and the government building was hit with enough force to shatter over one third of the seven-story structure and reduce its north face to smoldering rubble. According to bystanders, a massive ball of fire momentarily outshone the sun as the north side of the building disintegrated. Traffic signs and parking meters were ripped from the pavement, while shattered glass exploded in every direction like a hail of bullets, maiming nearby pedestrians. Timothy McVeigh never heard or saw any of it because he was already blocks away, wearing earplugs to protect himself from the blast, which was so powerful that it lifted some people off the ground up to a mile away.

April 19th, 2005 was a perfect, sun-drenched L.A. morning in full springtime bloom. Against a picturesque deep blue, cloudless sky, a shiny black stolen Cadillac Escalade with run-flat tires on twenty inch “dub” rims carefully maneuvered its way through the streets of an unsuspecting and blissfully ignorant populace in Beverly Hills, down San Vicente towards the Hard Rock café on the corner of the Beverly Center, at the Beverly boulevard intersection.

History was, a decade later, about to repeat itself, with similar deadly consequences.

We might not have been able to provide such an astonishing show of fireworks, but we could still create chaos, we could still disrupt the system.

We thought we could get away with it.

We knew that they would never see us coming. All people saw when they looked at us was three white, punker kids, society’s disenfranchised trash, begging for spare change. We were not terrorists. We were a shoplifting hazard. We were about to change the way the world looked at us all again, like Columbine, like Red Lake. We were ready to set it all on fire, for anarchy, for better or worse, and to take our place in the annals of this fucked up American history, in pop culture, and on a zillion tawdry and meaningless cable news programs around the world; if we lived through it.

We really did think we could get away with it. After all, it wasn’t the first bomb we had set off or the first commercial property we had set fire to. It was just bigger, much bigger, and far more public. It was a full blown airborne media event waiting to happen, as unexpected as September 11th, that would spread the fear and distrust of the system across the planet like a shockwave that no one would forget.

There was no way the parent company, Taubman Centers, Inc., could shut this up.

I think I knew from the first moment I saw it that I wanted to blow up the Beverly Center, that I would have eventually tried even if I had never met Drew Groll. I wanted to see it explode in a rain of glass and fire, all of it, in every direction, showering the jaded civilians in their cars on La Cienega, the diners eating at the Daily Grill across the street, the people watching from across the street while they ate at Jerry’s-fucking-Deli; everyone in L.A. who thought they had already seen it all.

5 points for speaking power to the truth.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

Drew rolled over and opened one eye at me suspiciously, stretching and yawning like a lazy cat. I silently pushed the coffee I had scored from the corner market towards her and she smiled. It was difficult freighting coffee to the building and she knew it.

She leaned over and kissed me and Sandra groaned.

“What the fuck are you doing up at seven in the goddamn fucking morning kissing and making out with one another after we all screwed the night away?”

Drew let out a burst of short, nervous giggles and I kissed her again. Sandra began looking for her drug kit and sharpening a needle on a matchbook with her eyes half open.

Everything is always on its way to someplace else.

*** *** ***

Adam works for a big insurance company that uses a cartoon duck as its spokesperson.

He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and his two children.

He goes to church on Sundays when he is in town, belongs to the local Masonic lodge, and is a former Cub Scout leader.

He’s a respected member of the community, a successful businessman who likes to dabble in golf, and real estate speculation. Last year he donated a tenth of his salary to several well-known charities, and his wife made sure that every single one of their friends heard about it.

He’s mag-fucking-nanimous.

5 points for being sneaky.

He’s also a terrible masochist, whose only hope of getting his dirty rocks off and making it through another year to his 12th anniversary, with the cow that ate his beautiful young wife, hinges on the possibility of seeing Sandra in the Marriot Hotel near LAX before he heads off to Pittsburgh for a sales meeting or Atlantic City for a conference.

Adam needs Sandra to abuse him. He needs her to blindfold him, tie him up, and put burning cigarettes out on his scrotum, after shoving vibrating sex toys up his lubricated rectum.

He needs Sandra to scream at him, beat him with a paddle, and piss on him.

He needs her to rake her nails over his delicate white skin, to torture his nipples with clamps, and to jack him off into her hand before rubbing it in his face.

He needs her to tell him that he doesn’t deserve this kind of attention and that he’s not worthy to be whipped with a braided cat of nine tails, or cut with a single tail whip, or have his testicles pierced with butterfly hypodermic needle points.

He needs to be left hanging in the dark for no more than an hour or he won’t have enough time to make it to the terminal, past all the terrorism security check points, and onto his plane. If you stop to think about it, it’s hysterical, considering we’re planning on using his gas guzzling, environmentally-unfriendly, midlife crisis mobile to commit a commemorative terrorist attack on the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. He won’t even have enough time to stop in the bathroom and relieve the persistent stinging on the inside of his bruised thighs with Aspercreme. He’ll just have to pop a Soma.

None of us needed the hassle of Sandra turning a trick the day before our big event but since Adam parked his Escalade at the airport while he was gone, so he doesn’t have to be at the mercy of a retard driving one of those blue shuttles when he gets home, tying him up and delaying him just a little ensured that we’d get a chance to swipe his keys and parking stub. It took Drew and I nearly a half an hour to find his SUV but no one gave us a second look when we pulled out, which is strange, for a guy with a pink Mohawk and a girl with dreadlocks and sleeve tattoos.

Fast forward to Oxnard, then to the parking lot of our abandoned office museum that never opens, and then add in everything that I have already told you and we’re current.

That means you can officially consider yourself up to speed, so if you need to flip the tape over or switch cameras before you continue your “unofficial government interview” without the presence of my lawyer, now might be a good time. I guess after Gonzalez, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo I should consider myself lucky. Right. Onward then.

It may have been the best night of my entire life, which means I should have known that I would never see her again.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I won the coin toss and so I would be brandishing the flare gun with which we intended to ignite our cargo, after crashing it head on into the Hard Rock at ground level on the northwest corner of the Beverly Center, at the cross streets of San Vincente and Beverly Boulevard across from Cedars Sinai Medical Center and the Jerry’s-fucking-Deli. We figured if we buried the bomb deep enough inside the café that the detonation would take out a large section of the parking lot and hopefully the Macy’s above it would tumble down onto the street in a fiery ball of melting merchandise.

Unlike Oklahoma City, we would reduce the chances of civilian casualties with an early attack. The famous Hard Rock Café, with its midnight blue Cadillac with painted flames jutting through the roof, opened daily at 11:30 am. It seemed only fitting that our Cadillac would prevent it from ever opening again.

I was supposed to dump the diesel fuel after we crashed, then we would rush across the street to the Tail of the Pup and fire off the flare gun until it ignited. After that, there was no plan. We would just sit there and watch all the confusion, we would breath it in like amniotic fluid and feel complete.

Call me Andy-fucking-Nihil baby.

0 points.

The guide we relied on for monkeywrenching suggested that we use brightly colored ski masks to distract and confuse bystanders. Drew, who is beautiful beyond the telling and who I miss more than words, recalled that a series of bank robberies were committed in the nude, which prevented eye witnesses from recalling what the robber looked like. She said that no matter how much the FBI questioned people making deposits on the days of the robberies, or tellers from the bank, all they could remember was the size of the bandits penis, that he was attractively well hung, and that he had pleasantly trimmed his pubic hair. The media later dubbed him the naked bandit. He was never caught.

It was her idea to go naked, wearing only 14 hole Doc Martins so that running across broken glass wouldn’t be any kind of problem. We were laughing most of the way, driving up Sunset, totally unconcerned with the morning traffic and turning left onto San Vincente, rolling down towards fate.

Sandra had shot up early, way more than usual, and then when she came out of it she started snorting my homemade crank. Drew and I smoked some chronic then switched to the last of the peanut butter colored concoction I had whipped up the night before. We were all pretty well buzzing.

It wasn’t until we got up close, past Melrose, that I noticed the problem, noticed the ring of protestors out in front of the mall, all carrying signs with PETA stickers and cheap, catchy slogans smeared on them. All of the rush and bravado that I had been pumping myself up on began to diminish. There were going to be a lot of civilian casualties if we continued, not to mention way more press than I expected, and witnesses. I started to hyperventilate at the thought of hurting all of those people, and I tried to reach over for the wheel, but Drew held my hands and Sandra floored it into the crowd.

The protestors were chanting something while television cameras circled them.

There were models in the front row of protestors, Hollywood celebrities protesting fur, or red meat, or something.

There was an evil and malicious glint in Sandra’s eyes when she recognized what was happening.

It was what they had both been dreaming from the beginning. To the girls it was like Christmas and Easter and the Super Bowl all rolled up into one.

We were going well over 70 mph with no sign of stopping.

We were headed for the front of the Hard Rock head on and gaining momentum.

We were going up and over the curb before I blacked out, the first wave of protestors parting in front of us like a sea of people, and then all I remember is the sound of breaking glass.

When I came to there were people all around us, Drew was gone, and Sandra was lodged in the windshield. Her driver’s side airbag never deployed. She hadn’t worn her seatbelt and suddenly it struck me that maybe she hadn’t planned on living through this in the first place.

Everything around me seemed to be in motion, creaking or falling or bursting into flames.

I remember smelling the diesel, which meant that either the milk containers had burst in the crash or someone had already emptied them onto the fertilizer, mixing the bomb components.

The fumes were so strong they made me gag.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

I crawled out of the open passenger side door and into a swarm of people before I noticed that my flare gun was missing. No one would come near me. I was naked and covered in a film of white silt from when the airbag went off, and a stream of bright red blood was trickling out of my nose. I must have looked amazing.

I remember that some of the news cameras closed in on me, that there was a lady from one of the local channels with a large black microphone with an affiliate logo emblazoned on it, that she kept asking me if I was part of the protest.

I remember that I was having trouble focusing, that I didn’t remember how I had gotten there, or know why I was naked, wearing only blue Docs, but that it didn’t really bother me.

Within the minute or two that I stood there trying to get my bearings, cameras came out of everywhere, every channel I could imagine. There was a lady screaming from within the café and I heard a little girl crying near me but I couldn’t see her. I looked down at the ground, trying to catch my breath, and I saw a trail of white powder leading off across the intersection, mixed with blood. I raised my head and squinted and my eyes came back into focus.

There, standing across the street, was Drew, leveling the flare gun at me, stark naked.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

I raised my arms and spread them out like Jesus on a great big invisible cross and smiled. There was a popping sound, and hissing, and then I saw it coming towards me, a bright red glowing flare moving so fast that I barely had time to register what it was before it hit me in the face and the world went black.

I didn’t have time to wonder why she had left me in the car, if she had thought I was dead too or if she was angry at me for trying to make Sandra swerve at the last minute.

I didn’t have time to ask her if she meant to hit me with the flare or if it was an accident, if she had wanted me dead or why.

I didn’t have time to react to her being run down by an MTA as she stepped off the curb to fire at me.

Right before I felt the flare hit me in the head I noticed that everyone had stopped screaming, that the world had gone absolutely one hundred and ten percent quiet, and I thought, in a detached way, that it was very strange.

The blackness reached up and swallowed me into a dreamless void like an iron fist closing around me. There, in that complete darkness, one thing repeated itself in my brain, over and over again, the like hook from a bad pop song about love gone wrong.

I’m in love with I’m in love with I’m in love with Drew Groll.

Beyond the fear and the terror and the horror of existence there is nothing, I know that now.

Everything is always in motion, thrashing headlong into the final abyss, a great and memorable self-immolation, just like we were.

So it really doesn’t matter what you do to me anymore. Feel free to take my confession and make an example out of me, like McVeigh, like Moussaoui, like any number of other freedom fighters who fell victim along the way to their nagging conscience or ineptitude.

She was my ultimate truth and now she’s gone.

You have to understand that this is entirely my own fault.

I was born to fail them. I know that now. It’s just in my nature, that’s all.

Author Bio: Devan Sagliani holds a BA in English from the University of California Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in Word Riot, Impetus, Outsider Ink, and Thirst For Fire.

He currently resides in Los Muertos where he is plotting a great and terrible revenge upon the world in literary form. He may be reached at devan@devansagliani.com.