Consumed- The Complete Works

by Kyle M. Scott

  This guy, man, he looked like some sort of Greek God of Old, sent here with the dual purposes of making all us other men feel vastly inferior while effortlessly scoring with each and every girl the rest of us mortals always dreamed of having, but never could.

  I never begrudged the handsome bastard, though.

  How could I?

  He wasn’t the jock type, nor was he a bully. He was kind to everyone he met, and he never turned his back on a friend.

  Where most of the truly beautiful people in our world are insufferable dickheads, Derwood was a true gentleman, as affable and humble as he was striking and sexually magnetic.

  Being a mere mortal, I guess I should have hated him, but, like everyone else in Louisville, I loved the guy from the inside out. Not least of all because we shared all the same passions, being in no particular order worth detailing: Weed, LSD, Science-Fiction, girls, and - man’s greatest endeavor – the aforementioned and almighty Pinball.

  Also, the guy’s parents named him fucking ‘Derwood’, man.

  It seemed to me like his good looks amounted to the universe sorta helping to balance out his chances in life, since his drunk-ass parents had so skillfully fucked him over at the very first hurdle.

  Imagine learning to talk and use big-boy words, and then finding out that your old folks had named you for a deep-woods dwelling, caravan-coasting hillbilly.

  Imagine school.

  Just imagine that shit.

  Anyway…I gotta admit, it also helped our friendship greatly that wherever Derwood went, the girls surely would follow. And I had no qualms about looking after the dejected ones that never quiet reached my friend’s standards.

  No sir. I got my share of good loving and then some.

  Who cared if the truly stunning ladies ended up in his bedroom? I got the cuties. The ‘girl-next-door’ types. And that was more than enough for me, kids. There is a lot to be said for being the wingman to an Adonis, and let no man ever tell you any different…

  Life went on in this fashion for nearing five years, and it was bliss.

  Looking back on it, we were living life like a pair of fucking Hobbits.

  Though only one of us resembled such a creature.

  If my life was that movie, I was the slightly overweight, reliable one - I can’t remember his name off the bat, but I think he was a Goonie - and Derwood had the starring role. He was the tall dark hero, windswept and dazzlingly interesting, fit to be king.

  A filthy, fuck-able hero for the ages.

  The days and years all passed by in a sort of stoned daze, as inconsequential as taking a piss in a rainstorm.

  Be nice to have a few photographs to reminisce over, but who has time to take photos?

  Still, if I ever have kids, I’d like ‘em to know their dad wasn’t always a care-worn shmoe with bloodshot eyes and a tragically balding head.

  If I ever have kids. Jesus. After this morning’s chain of events, it doesn’t look like I’ll be having any young pups to boast to anytime soon.

  Now that the world has kind of fucking ended and all.

  I’m still really shocked by how quickly things went from pretty to shitty on our planet, and practically all in the space of one night.

  It was like Black Friday gone global. Six billion people collectively losing their shit, either by flame or by fear.

  I was never much of a one for having faith in the human race, but damn…things went sour quick!

  Anyway, I’ll get to that soon. First, let me finish up with what I’m starting to think of as my ‘defense’…

  ***

  It didn’t occur overnight, but in truth I think I can accurately pinpoint the moment when my freewheeling existence succumbed to a kind of lingering, insidious cancer.

  I never started coughing up my life-blood till some time down the road, but the period when my happy little kingdom began to come crashing down around me was when I first slapped my eyeballs on Kate Price.

  Derwood and I were kicking back in our favorite bar, at that time known as ‘The Little Rock’. It was the kind of establishment that catered to our breed of outcast. The boom-box was always kicking out the jams, and for the most part, the tunes were solid - Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix were commonplace for the more acid-driven kids akin to my motley crew, Metallica. Pearl Jam and the like, would keep the grunge and metal crowd happy and knocking back the ales. It was a good mix of people and sounds, the sort of place where the lights were always low, and the vibes were always clean.

  If I could have eaten, shit, and slept there, I probably would have.

  I believe I’ve done all three on occasion, but not long term and never more than one at a time, which is more than can be said for some of the other patrons.

  Anyway, it was on this fine and footloose October night in The Little Rock, when I first caught a glimpse of the most beautiful specimen of femininity I’d ever beheld.

  I was on my fifth Jack Daniel’s and Coke when out of nowhere, this heaven-sent creature approached me, as though from a fever dream.

  Me. The little guy.

  First thing she does…she smiles and asks me if I’m just gonna stare all day or if I’m gonna buy her a drink. Despite her somewhat clichéd cattiness it took me more than a few moments to compose myself as this goddess stood before me with an unspeakably sexy smirk painted on her luscious lips. She was taller than me, had legs that could destroy Tokyo and a set of fun-pillows on her that could make a grown man beg for buttermilk. Long flowing hair, dark and straight, hung over her porcelain face. Her smiling eyes seemed to sing of pleasures and sins previously unknown to mortal man (yep…me), and her body…that body was the back-up band that looked ready and eager to play all night long.

  Perhaps I’d helped enough old ladies cross the road in my time or handed enough cash out to the town’s local homeless to gain the almighty’s favor. Who really knows? But at that moment, the little guy got the gorgeous girl.

  Even Derwood was speechless.

  Suck on that, Der!

  Though, in true Derwood fashion, my noble compadre never once thought to cut in on my good fortune. Instead he - like this sex-drenched space-girl - simply waited to see how I’d react to this most uncommon occurrence.

  And waited and waited.

  Did I tell you I was no Don Juan? Well…that shit is the truth.

  Eventually I managed to drool out a response to her question (if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this shit, kids) and by some act of God my response must have been both charming and literate, because within six hours, she was in my bed, on her hands and knees and as naked as the day the doctor slapped her butt and proclaimed her a miracle, which is exactly what I was getting down to in the bed, as it happens.

  I fell in love, and in lust, with Kate from the moment we met. I was doomed from the very start, man. Average guys like me get to jack-off to this sort of lady, but we never get to exchange fluids with them in the real world, know what I mean?

  And before you think me shallow, it wasn’t just her outer beauty that caught hold of me. She had an inner light that burned so bright it could drive a man spitfire-insane. That first night, after we fucked and lay there soaked and spent, she told me of her life. It was quite a tale…

  Here was a gal who had seen innumerable hard times and had travelled far and wide searching for herself. She’d went from New York and down to LA, had hung with the hippies and the sun (and the dragon) for the best part of her young life. She had no folks to speak of, having been abandoned by them when she was just a kid, and no fixed address. She was, in short, my idea of perfection. A spaced out, free-flying lunar-girl. An ethereal cereal I wanted to feast on every morning for the rest of my damn life.

  We talked all through the night, interspersed with bouts of gentler lovemaking, and by the time the dawn had come calling, I was ready to get on one fucking knee and propose to this wayward, wild, gypsy princess.

  We were married in a small, humanist ceremony attended only by close friend
s and family. Almost all of whom were on my side of the aisle.

  Having reconnected in the intervening years, Kate had her Mother on her side. I was unsure what to make of her, but that woman was as proud as any mother would be on her daughter’s big day.

  It was the happiest day of my life. I was ready to give her my whole world - body, mind and soul.

  Turns out she was only interested in the soul part.

  Go figure.

  ***

  I’m still not sure of the exact moment when things went south for us. The first year of our shotgun marriage was a wondrous blur of sounds, sights, laughter and lovemaking. We embraced the world like big fat bastards at a buffet. We lived for the day and damned the dark. She moved in with me and Derwood, and the three of us lived like some sort of fucked-up hippy family, he the cool brother and me the lucky lover. We were adrift on a wave of youthful abandon and it was the best year of my life, what I can remember of it, anyway.

  Alas, what goes up must eventually come crashing down, and Kate flew higher than most. Her appetite for psychedelics was enormous, and she could drink a fucking Viking under the table. It was beginning to dawn on me that my damaged little space-girl was a lot more damaged than I’d first thought.

  What was once poetic was steadily proving tragic.

  Life rolled on, though, as it always does, and Kate and I looked forward.

  After that first year, we decided it was time to start looking for a place of our own. We found the perfect apartment on Almond Street, just far enough off the beaten track to safely avoid temptations. See, by this point, I was getting a little worried about Kate’s behavior. She was snorting back more cocaine than could ever be deemed healthy, even in our hedonistic circle, and the drinking had reached a kind of fever pitch. She’d been arrested four times in two months, had even done a few weeks inside for possession with intent to sell.

  Now, as you’re already aware, I like my chemicals, but I’m not a fucking lunatic. I lead, or led, a simple existence - fun, friends and frivolity. Hard drugs were an occasional thing for me, a kind of guilty pleasure, but for Kate, getting stoned off her ass was a way of life.

  The whole thing came to a pretty conclusive head one night when she’d arrived home drunk as all shit and crying her eyes out. I was already asleep when she crawled in the door, having spent the night hanging with Derwood and watching some old horror movies on the internet. My head had hit the pillow at around 11pm, and it was close to 3am was when Kate dragged her carcass back to our abode. She slumped on the edge of the bed, and through a veil of tears and running mascara, proceeded to confess her sins to Father Donnie.

  Turns out that earlier that night she’d dropped six ecstasy tablets and had went on something of a booze-fueled rampage around the local bars. She recalled a lot of dancing and a lot of tequila, and then, at some point during the evening she had lost consciousness. When she came to, she was being violently ass-fucked by some sweaty, drunken Neanderthal in some shit-stained men’s room.

  She told me she was so numb from the drugs, she never knew she was being reamed until the whole thing was over and the sleazy rapist bastard had finished with her and pulled himself from her battered hole. He’d left her lying there on the piss-soaked floor, with her skirt round her ankles and his spittle running down the back of her neck.

  This, kids, was the last fucking straw.

  It was twelve steps or a dead stop for my lost lady.

  ***

  What I’ve learned - if I’ve learned anything - is that some things can never be mended. Some things that are broken just can’t be put back together again, no matter how much you will it or how much love and care you put into the repairing.

  Though I hadn’t known it on meeting and falling for her, and though she had successfully hidden her sizable array of demons very well for the first year of our life together, Kate was truly broken. Stone cold broken. The mask had slowly fallen off, the cracks in her psyche had widened, and the demons had come charging out. I still loved her - boy, did I love her - but I was beginning to understand that there was little I could do to help her. You’ve all heard that old saying about a person having to help themselves before they can accept help from others? Well, that was Kate. It took some filthy rapist banging her in some god-forsaken shit-stall before she finally realized just how far down the dark path she’d trodden.

  Despite my encroaching sense of helplessness, I rose to the challenge, deeming it my noble duty to save my wife, to bring her out of the darkness and into the light any way I could. And so, after some gentle persuasion and the promise to remain by her side through hell and high water, Kate agreed to seek some professional help.

  And that’s when things got really fucking bad.

  ***

  It was four weeks after attending her first counseling and group therapy sessions that my dear, damaged Kate started questioning her faith, and a further two weeks before she stated in no uncertain terms that she had ‘found God’.

  Fine…no problem, thought I. I knew these damn twelve step classes were infamous for forcing faith onto the weakened, weary minds of the poor souls whose paths led them there, but I saw little harm in my Kate finding some solace and strength in faith. If a little loving from Jesus could help her overcome her demons, I welcomed it. Hell, I encouraged it to begin with.

  When she started reading the bible, I quietly and respectfully left her to it. I still had my Richard Laymon collection to keep me sane, and who was I to judge?

  When she started attending church once on Sunday and one night through the week, I quietly and respectfully left her to it. I had my George Romero movies and my porn, and who was I to judge?

  When she ever-so-tentatively asked me to join her in church one Sunday, I agreed (not without a little apprehension), as I was doing nothing that night and had to admit to feeling a little curious as to what went on in those ‘temples of the faith’. I continued to go with her many times more, even though I had no faith of my own. I let her believe that I believed.

  Yep, I’d done all this and more, and felt pretty damn fine about myself for doing it. I never believed for one second in any of it, but my love, who had so recently been teetering on the abyss, had finally found something she could hold onto that wouldn’t hold onto her.

  Or so I thought.

  Kate took to religion with the same manic fervor she took to narcotics. She’d slowly but surely weaned herself off of dirty physical habits and replaced them with dirty spiritual ones. No simple, god-loving churchgoing endeavors for Kate - she leapt head-first into the sort of fundamentalism that scared most good Christians rigid. Within a few months of us leaving our old apartment and heading off on our own, Kate had gone from sin-loving drug-dustbin to Jesus-preaching head-case.

  It was only a month after that when her church decided she wasn’t welcome anymore in their circle.

  See, these were garden variety Christians, man. They loved their families, they did their best to be good people, and they kept their religion, and opinions on matters of social morality, to themselves. They respected the other fuck-ups in our humble little community and were respected back in kind, by one and all.

  But Kate…Kate was the fucking Mother from ‘Carrie’.

  I don’t know what she said or done to find herself kicked from the flock, but judging from her behavior at home, I had a pretty good idea…

  Our once humble crib was no longer adorned with posters of Jim Morrison or Arthur Lee. Now the place looked like the fucking Vatican. Crosses were hung everywhere as though the Anti-Christ was fixing to drop by for a soda and a soul, and the poetry and lyrics that once were framed and cherished had been tossed in the trash, replaced with doom-laden verses from the bible and pictures of good old Jesus (with white skin and blue eyes, too, I noticed). She’d make me say grace at dinner, reprimanded me for cursing, and had all but given up on sex.

  “Not unless we’re making a baby. Otherwise it’s not God’s good will,” she’d say.


  As you can imagine, blowjobs and butt-sex were the first to go. Soon, the rest went with ‘em, quietly off into the night.

  My once shining beacon of freedom and love had become a goddam crazy lady and was still only twenty-three years old. Now you tell me…how are you supposed to work with that?

  Before I knew it, she was proclaiming my beloved weed and beer to be the Devil’s wares and was convinced I’d burn in the eternal ovens of Hell should I not give myself to Jesus.

  She had me put away all my favorite movies, and demanded I stop reading the “filth that you think passes as fiction.”

  She sold all my beautiful vinyl records, too – collector’s items and all - behind my back, and when I lost my shit with her, she calmly, arrogantly gestured to me for a fucking hug and stated she was “saving me.”

  I’d lost the real Kate, and somehow, somewhere along the line, I’d lost myself as well.

  ***

  It didn’t happen right away, but as the months and then years rolled on, my love for Kate morphed into a sort of twisted, creeping dependence. I stopped seeing my friends simply because she thought they were a bad influence on me. I stopped going out. I was weighing up the consequences. To hit the bar or visit a friend would only lead to extreme grief back at home, and I figured it wasn’t worth it.

  I now know that this is how a person comes to find themselves in an abusive relationship.

  The old, original version of Donnie would have scoffed at such a notion, but here I was - drink and drug-free, friend-free, and trapped in a relationship with no love and no mutual respect.

  Fuck only knows when it happened, but after a time she’d systematically worn me down to nothing, a hollow shell with no one to turn to but the person who’d imprisoned me. Men used their fists to beat into submission the spirit of their women, woman on the other hand, used something every bit as insidious…