Planet Fever

by Stier Jr. , Peter

  KTOWN WATERS PUBLISHING

  Copyright © 2015 Peter Stier Jr

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ktown Waters Publishing, Los Angeles, CA.

  ISBN-13: 978-0692582329

  ISBN-10: 0692582320

  Cover Art Design & Illustration: Sara Winkle

  (instagram.com/sara.winkle)

  Interior Design: Colleen Sheehan (wdrbookdesign.com)

  Tail me on Twitter @peterstierjr

  Check the blog: mindwashfollies.blogspot.com

  “HEY, WHOSE story is this, anyway?”

  “Yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. What’s happening here?”

  “You are being interrogated.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. What’s at stake?”

  “Your mind. And the planet Earth.”

  “Oh. I guess we should get on with this, then….”

  IF FINISHING this novel were a matter of life and death, then I didn’t seem to be in any rush to save the universe. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t in a rush to do anything. My head was still in a mild fog from the pills I had spent the last month testing down at the A-to-Z Research and Clinical Trials Center in Redondo Beach, CA. Easy cash. $2000 for residing in a clinic and taking experimental pharmaceuticals. One month of room and board, meals covered, just pop the pills, get the blood pressure checked daily, blood drawn a few times per week, and write out a little “how are you feeling?” report daily. Oh, and you can’t leave the premises until the month is up. Piece of cake for a moneyless, bonafide hack writer like myself.

  It’ll inspire me to finish the novel. I’ll have plenty of time to do it there.

  Yeah. Right.

  Most of the stay was a fog. I don’t even recall getting discharged, and that was a while ago.

  Not sure what those pills did, but the booze I had already blown most my money upon probably didn’t help matters. I was beginning to go from “drunk hack writer” to just plain drunk,and a blackout one to boot.

  Oh well.

  A walk to the liquor store was in order, to “collect my thoughts” and wind up for the big afternoon and night of writing. Damn if I wasn’t going to finish this book.

  But first, I needed fuel.

  Down the stairs I went and exited my building—formerly a hotel for the “who’s who” in Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s which had been “renovated” into a semi-low-rent apartment building that seemed to attract aspiring actors, writers, directors, and producers, which really meant that it housed a bunch of waiters and waitresses, dancers, caterers, bartenders, night watchmen, con-artists, and bell-hops. I was the odd-man out: my aspirations had nothing to do with the movie industry. I was a novelist.

  That meant I was more delusional than all of them combined.

  Since my childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut had been shot to hell, might as well aim for the gutter. Be the legit, street-credentialed, from-the-gut author that the establishment refused to notice, but because of a cult-like following I would amass, the establishment could not ignore.

  Like I said, I was delusional.

  Outside, plenty of afternoon traffic kicked up dust and noise. It was an overcast and mild Los Angeles day, and the smell of rain was in the air, along with the cacophony of thirty different car-horns bleating and beeping and honking.

  I walked toward the Monsignor Romero Tienda, a little market/liquor store owned by a nice old El Salvadorian couple. The cause of the traffic snarl and mass car-horn din manifested into my awareness: some poor sap wearing desert camouflaged pants and a tank-top was trying to push his VW Vanagon out of traffic and into a gas station/mechanic on the corner and it was pissing off many an asshole whose progress to whatever bullshit place they had to get to was being impeded. Behind the steering wheel of the Vanagon was only visible a little head with braided ponytails, the man’s little sister or daughter. He was trying to direct her into the gas station/mechanic, but without much success.

  I trotted out into the honking traffic. “Hey man, I’ll push.”

  He looked at me, relieved. “Yeah. The station.”

  I nodded as he ran around and got into the vehicle. One of the cooks from the papusaria joint next to the gas station appeared by my side and the two of us pushed the VW into the gas station. The cook and I shook hands and he walked back into his restaurant.

  The guy got out along with the girl. He was in his mid-twenties. She could be no older than seven.

  “Man, I really appreciate that,” he said.

  “No sweat,” I said.

  “But you are sweating!” the little girl said, pointing at my sweat-ridden shirt.

  “You are right. Yes sweat!” I said.

  She laughed at that one.

  “Broke down, huh?”

  “Think the fuel pump went out.” He looked down.

  “We’re trying to get to Arizona so my daddy can work. But we got no—”

  “Honey, that’s enough. The nice man doesn’t need to hear this.” He patted his girl on the head then glanced up at me. “Thanks again.”

  “The V.A. screwed my daddy. He got nerve gassed by our own guys in Desert Storm and now they won’t admit it so we’re—”

  “Honey, what did I say? That is not a story we need to be telling everybody.”

  “But it’s true!” said the little girl.

  “You were in Iraq?”

  “Army.” He pointed to the “Honorably Discharged Veteran” license plate on the back of his VW. He patted his girl on the head again.

  The owner of the garage, Hamlet, an intense-eyed Armenian who always gave the impression he wanted to kick your ass but was actually a straight-up guy, walked toward us, looking like he wanted to kick our asses. He didn’t ask any questions. He stubbed his little cigar out on the pavement, reached into the VW, popped the hood then went to the front of the vehicle and checked the engine out.

  “Fuel pump. $200 total. I can do now,” he said, then took out another of the little convenience store cigars from the wrapper and lighted it. He walked back into the garage.

  The guy who I had just helped shook his head. He didn’t have the money. Well, I bet he’d probably $200 to his name, which was the cost of fuel to get him to a new life in Arizona. He could probably get the vehicle fixed, then be stuck here, the very prison of a city he was attempting to flee.

  His little girl was humming some popular tune, walking along a crack and pretending it was a tightrope. She didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

  Admirable.

  In my wallet, a bunch of twenties resided. Ten of them, to be precise. Last of the pharmaceutical experiment pay.

  Shit.

  The girl hummed and played.

  Her dad tried to figure out the next move.

  I took out the stack of bills, walked over to the dad, and handed them to him.

  “No way, dude. I can’t,” he said.

  “Hey man, if you don’t take it, then I’ll just walk into the garage and hand it to Hamlet.”

  He tried to keep it cool but his eyes watered up a bit. He took the money. “Thanks, brother.”

  “Good luck.” We shook hands.

  The little girl stopped her shenanigans and looked up at me and gave me one of those beaming and beautiful smiles that can only emit from untarnished innocence. “You’re nice,” she said.

  Rain started falling. A flash of lightning and a thunderclap reverberated throughout the atmosphere. Never experienced that before, not in Los Angeles. The being called “nice,” that is.

  And the lightning.

  I walked across the street, back to my building.

  I climbed up the stairs and unlocked the door to my a
partment. Thanks to the rain today as well as the past week, the place hadn’t been as hot as usual. In fact, it was relatively cool.

  I like that.

  When it’s hot, all I want to do is relax and try not to contemplate how hot it is —that and drink cold, cheap beer. But when it’s cool, I tend to move around, read, do a little writing, maybe even exercise a touch.

  What pisses me off: on the tube some façade-ridden newscaster smile notifies another façade-ridden newscaster smile how “beautiful” it’s going to be tomorrow when the forecast calls for 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

  95 degrees is not my idea of “beautiful.”

  It melts my brain.

  As a matter of fact, I have an accurate portrait of Hell in my mind when I envision 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Especially when no air conditioning exists in the place you are residing in.

  What gets me are those fake smiles turning to (real?) frowns when the weather clown predicts “a good chance of rain for the afternoon”… as though he were predicting the apocalypse. And then the senior buffoon turns and says, “Well, we sure could use the rain.” And the rest of the robot rubes sitting by him nod their heads in agreement at his sage proclamation. Nauseating.

  It had been raining, like I was saying. I thought about what to do. I opened the refrigerator and took out one of the two remaining cans of beer. Miller Wide-Mouth. Don’t care much for the wide-mouthed option Miller has foisted upon us. They prompt the beer to be guzzled faster than with the regular-topped cans. The wide-mouth may be swell if time is of the essence in swallowing the brew and/or garnering a buzz, but the savoring of each and every gulp is sacrificed. With the wide-mouth, the ends are more critical than the means.

  Actually, upon further thought, it is Miller, so the faster it gets over with, the better. They know how crappy their stuff is, so they are doing us a favor.

  I drank down the first beer and grabbed the last one. This one was poured into the cleanest glass on-hand that didn’t smell bad. I drank it down, but with greater deliberation and patience, even though it was Miller. I guess I was a glutton for self-induced suffering.

  THE BEER was all gone and the rain had stopped.

  With plenty of time to burn, I knew that something productive needed to happen. Two-and-a-half garbage bags of aluminum cans sat in the corner of the kitchen, so a visit to the recycling place would be something to do. Then I would get to writing that damn novel.

  How had it come to this? What happened to that young, brash go-getter that was going to put the world in a wedgie and knew that he would be somebody, do something, and write that masterpiece of a novel that would mean something and make heads turn?

  Life, that’s what.

  And procrastination.

  The kid that thought he was going to amount to something had concluded he was a fraud living in a cold farce of a world that didn’t really give a shit so neither would he.

  Perpetual writer’s block and a steady regimen of booze will do that to a person.

  I had no money left at all, so going out and cashing in the cans would at least get me through part of the day. I slung the bags over my shoulder and exited my place. I walked down the stairs and out to the back lot where my ’85 Toyota pick-up truck was parked. I tossed the bags in the back and got in. Because I had managed to lose the keys to the vehicle a little while back, I had to start the thing with a flat-head screwdriver. I had removed the steering wheel cover, causing the ignition plug to dangle off the steering wheel column. This ignition plug is a cylinder-like object that is attached umbilically to the column via a series of wires. When a flathead is pushed into the hole of the plug and turned—and with some pressure on the gas-pedal—the vehicle comes alive.

  I put the driver in and turned.

  The twelve-year-old machine started.

  The truck sounded bad.

  In fact, if you’ve ever been within earshot of a chain-smoking middle-aged woman who coughs like an old man, you’ve got an idea of what my truck sounded like. That also happens to be the sound of a clutch plate on the verge of doom.

  I rammed it into first gear and drove away.

  $6.85 WAS the amount I received for my hollow aluminum. That is $6.85 more than I had prior to cashing them in. $6.85 was paid to me for doing nothing aside from drinking cans of beer and making sure the empty ones had a bag all to themselves.

  Too bad $6.85 doesn’t cover very much with respect to monthly expenses.

  The liquor store next to the recycling place caught my eye.

  I went in and a few minutes later I came out with a pint of vodka and a scratch game lottery ticket. I dropped my very last quarter into Happy Jack’s cup.

  Happy Jack—the bum who always opened the door for me whenever I entered and exited this particular store and bowed to me as though I were royalty.

  Anyway, I hadn’t tested my luck in a while, due to the fact that this (the scratch game ticket) test always yielded the same results: losing. Today’s test of fate was called “Bonus Black Jack.” The odds of this particular game seemed pretty good: my three hands to the dealer’s one. This brief fake-casino stint went as such:

  Hand 1: my first card—an ace. Second card—a five.

  Hand 2: first card—queen. Second—six.

  Hand 3: first card—a nine. Second—an eight.

  Seventeen was my best hand. It was time for the dealer to show.

  Dealer’s hand: his first card—an eight. Second—the mighty king.

  The house won. I didn’t care because I figured I’d lose. With gambling—especially against a state-run operation—the odds are not in our favor (Bonus Black-Jack included). It’s how the loss is handed out which keeps we, the wretched masses, buying, scratching, and losing. The fact, like death, is that we will lose in a scratch game ticket deal called “existence” over the long haul.

  Look, I know some day I will die; ‘tis the means and “the lead up” that keeps my curiosity level in life up, the “how will it happen?”wonderment….

  How indeed.

  As an aside: the most boring and frivolous means of death is suicide: the deathee-to-be has already a firm preview about when and how the expiration of being will transpire. No element of surprise with the suicide. It’s a forfeit rather than a loss—like purchasing a scratch game ticket and tossing the thing into the trash before checking what’s under the wax.

  Hey—however few and far between, there do exist on this planet a few winners….

  Like I said, I figured I would lose. I reckoned I’d deal with the loss in a manner I had dealt with every single loss in my life hitherto: by going back to my place and drinking the bottle of vodka.

  I threw the losing ticket into the trash and felt a tap on my shoulder. A robust dose of patchouli rammed up my nostrils and my eyes watered up a bit as the beret-clad hippie girl who had doused herself in the stuff smiled, her deep brown eyes twinkling. I assumed the scrub next to her extending his grubby hand was her boyfriend.

  “Change?” he asked.

  “No, man. My last bit of change went to three places—the cup of Happy Jack, that garbage can and in this sack.” I held up my vodka purchase.

  The two of them laughed a playful kind of giggle.

  “No, brother. Would you like to change?” he said.

  He was offering me something: a pamphlet.

  I took it, thanked him and they rambled off but the damn patchouli scent lingered.

  The pamphlet had the looks of one of those cheap religious-type tracts, with a picture of some very serene, airbrushed-looking hippie pointing at me. The figure wore mirrored aviator shades and had what looked like the Milky Way galaxy emblazoned in the background, as though he were floating in space. Above him were the words (written in spacey font) “Trust me!” and below “A to Z, ALWAYS. I’ll keep you posted.” I chucked the nonsense into the trash next to my lottery ticket and got in my truck.

  IN THE truck, heading back to my place, I turned on the radio. The tape player no longer worked after I
had driven my machete into the mouth of the bastard. I dialed the knob to the local public radio station. The National Inane U.S. Radio Report Show was playing. A vaudevillian voice, accompanied by circus-like music cracked through the one decent speaker:

  “Ladies and Gentlebuttholes—now for this first week of May 1997 … allow the madness to proceed … Froward Moroni presents his Weekly End Jack-up Statement!”

  Moroni’s voice had the cadence and style akin to those old “Movie-Tone” news film narrators:

  “Flash: Phos Atomos Paradosi, the Big Cheese of the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate has just cut a deal and now his outfit owns most shares of interest in the Milky-Way galaxy … Flash: Most Enemy Reality Authors and Reality Engineers have been tracked to planet Earth and are currently being rounded up, with one of the last lead Reality Author’s being interrogated in an undisclosed location…. Flash: Random sightings of third-eyes atop the foreheads of certain individuals have been reported by various members of the weird populace, the problem is being looked into by LSD-tripping rubes of the Intelligentsia…. Flash: The Experimental drug ‘Fractalyn’ is currently under testing and when approved, will revolutionize not only the way you think but what you think…. Flash: The Originator of All Realities has gone into hiding. Big Cheese Phos Atomos Paradosi has publicly stated: ‘For a being that created it all, that’s a pretty cowardly move. Maybe it’s time you pass the reigns to someone else, like me’…. Flash: A scientific study has proven that all non-scientists are wrong about everything…. Flash: The Royal Commission on Global Bravery has predicted that within the next 15 years, the entire planet will be fully brave and the date will change to be perpetually 1984…. Flash: The entire universe (and everything therein) has doubled in size overnight, the problem is attempting to be corrected…. Flash: the end of this story is being changed as we speak…. And that’s it for now—I am Froward Moroni and you’ve been listening to my Weekly End Jack-up Statement.”

  The circus music faded out and I turned the radio off. Same shit every week.