Forward to Glory

by Brian Paul Bach

  Becky was back.

  ‘Hey limpies, look who’s here! My lezzie friends! Nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah! Neaner, neaner, neaner, Sharler!’ Then, to the lipstick femme standing next to her, who was adjusting her hips, ‘Wow, Bobbie-baby! I love those thigh-high boots! That shortie skirt’s the flimsiest I’ve ever seen. Wanna raise the flap, or do I have to do it myself??’

  At least five haughty, high-stepping gals, of clearly dickless standing, made their entrance, posing in a lineup, arms akimbo, or adjusting big hair, or ready to swing accessories in self-defense, to burlesque the fucked-up losers in this neck of the woods, especially if they were giving their Becky a hard time. Always good for a semi-laugh.

  The guys groaned, too bone-stoned to do anything but croak ‘Fuck…’ in total, impotent disgust.

  ‘HEY!!! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??? That’s Sharlie’s special drink!!!!!’

  Becky went ballistic, lunging in the direction of the drinks trolley, heels amazingly intact.

  ‘You dumbo! That was Sharlie’s! I fixed it for him! Hey Sharlie! Sharlie?? This neighbor asshole drank your drink!’

  True to his Eleventh, Butterbugs had. The whole thing.

  ‘Goo-goo, gaa-gaa,’ was all Sharlie had to offer in response, waving his hands languidly.

  ‘You pork-rinds!’ Becky regarded them with disdain. ‘Can’t even defend me from some creep you brought over just to drive me from my girlfriends! Well, screw you. And you too, creep! You’re gonna love that drink. Too bad my ex-boyfriend missed out.’ Then, switching gears in just a jiffy: ‘Bobbie-Bobbie-Boobsy! Are you jealous when I let the boys touch me all over? Huh? What about you, Raven-Girl?’

  The gals were obviously moving in to take over the considerable riches abandoned by the checked-out ones. It was just private enough here for a bit of hot and nasty Venusian fest-making.

  The last thing Butterbugs saw before he himself mercifully passed out, was Becky making out with one of her girlfriends. Probably French-kissing.

  Hollywood parties!

  Eventide. Hard by an overgrown wall.

  Butterbugs awoke in such a state that he dearly wished he would never wake up again. Period. So he went back under.

  Desolate day. Further on, behind a potting shed.

  Many hours later, he awoke from his torpor and realized that his Vincent’s Tomato-Flavored Punch from last morn (strike that – morn before this – or whatever) had been spiked, probably with some sort of designer physic. Significantly, there was no bib of vomit on his person, nor was there any sign of such a deposit on the ground. Meaning, he had ingested the whole cargo, without, remarkably, bodily rejection. Instead, bodily reception. Because, all he knew was that he wanted more of it, whatever it was. Not the Vincent’s, which was like drinking liquid calf’s liver (only tomato-y-er), but whatever had swum in it. Not the hotness, which was like a boiler-bomb, shot into every atomic particle of his snout and maw. Something further. Something which his mind’s eye, made black by the impact, still retained on the bulletin board of its memory. It was a small particle, missable, but due to a persistence created by the subliminal knowledge of its power, and its electric puce coloring, rather like a floating marker in a video game, it grew in its conspicuity. No amount of alcohol had anything to do with its status as current dominator of his full attentions, be they ever so compromised at the moment.

  Come to think of it, there was more of an organic quality to this thing, which was coming into focus as his conscience began to evaporate from its effects in solution. Now, perception of certain properties was more grounded. Come to think of it, he had seen a little plummy Tic Tac-like pill floating in the mealy, narcotic ocean of the fun-beverage. Or was it more than one? On its curved surface, as though lighted from a sun as far away as the Ninth Planet’s moon Charon, there was a capital ‘O’, and another capital letter, a ‘C’, which appeared later in the word, to be precise. And an ‘x’ in there somewhere, too. Also, a ‘y’ – a couple of those, and an ‘n’… and…

  Lines to be memorized.

  Armed with this minimal but valuable cipher, Butterbugs suddenly had an overwhelming desire to rise up and walk, though the energy to do so did not even exist. The imperative was to get mobilized. The command was to somehow obtain a firearm, by which to hold up the nearest pharmacy or chemist’s laboratory, so as to possess more of these weird little ‘Tic Tacs’.

  Thus did the programming code, written into the pill, guide him on its mission, not his.

  No further discussion was necessary, no further debate was possible.

  It was something he had to do.

  An anger burned in the sub-chambers of his heart. It was indeterminate in nature, but the young actor felt it infiltrating his left ventricle. Then, a kind of hectoring toxin swelled through his veins, and poured into enraged capillaries all over his map. System gauges shot up past red lines, steam hissed from his tear ducts, fumes leached from his kneecaps. Panic slugged him in the gut. Even his fingernails howled with pain.

  Instead of ‘Charge!’ (not in triumph, but in defeat) his tortured frame was shrieking ‘Withdraw!’ (not in defeat, but in triumph).

  Fully and inarguably, he was seized by a pounding, unconscionable emergency. Its grip was tighter than that felt by sweet Esmerelda, her wrist imprisoned by Gudule the Recluse’s claw – while Quasimodo wept.

  And the terror multiplied, as the thrashing forces came not from without, but from within.

  Had he been able to step back from this rampant, surreal horror, a scientific observation offered a reasonable explanation. Chemistry amok! Specifically, a conscious but visceral evaporation from the downward-pulling power now in play, based on severe reaction to a most injurious substance, introduced orally. And stupidly. Unfortunately, said reaction was confined to the bulb of a vacuum, so to speak, doomed to cyclic repetition, indefinitely. Once activated, the Opiate Life must be maintained, even unto the end of the world. Sure enough, genuine justification for turmoil.

  As a result of this internal explosion, he felt like killing every goddamn pharmacy expert in greater Los Angeles, with incursions even into San Pino County. Whipped, shocked, and prodded toward the arts of Crude War, battle lines were hysterically drawn. Pity the fires that would result from his righteous, scorched-earth rampage! Oh, but nay! Pity, begone! What cared he for those many Burkmarts to be consumed in much-deserved conflagration, with all their innocent shoplifters and display docents? The skies would roil, sick with mess, so that he might triumph. For if his will not be done, he himself would be the flaming one. No still-living person could possibly be as sick as he! No one more deserved a cure!

  Where then, was the holy firearm that would, at the very least, make him feel less ill, by allowing him to take out some of his wrath, some of his self-disgust, on someone else for a change? Only by sacrificing a significant candidate could he get better. Preferably, one who was involved in the collective guilt that produced the very agony that now hamstrung his very soul, not to mention his mighty (but right now, mighty weak) flesh. He must aim, and then, pull the trigger.

  ‘Where is my sacrificial chicken?’ he roared… inside.

  Outside, he was just a jittering wad of scrap.

  Guns ’n’ chickens do not a holy warrior make.

  ‘Then I shall rise in my stirrups… and… And… smite…’

  Uh-huh.

  Oh yeah, it was something he had to do.

  One of these days…

  Piffle!

  But did he? No.

  No!

  It was a fever, a moiling, pissed-off cloud of insanity.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.’

  He was relieved. Relieved, understand?

  The Jupiter-scaled storm passed, with a flittermouse’s squeak.

  Is that all it was? And, had he learned a lesson, in old fashioned style?

  Here, today, on this weedy surface, in this town, on this here planet, he had dodged a bullet. It was as if he had been condemned to deportation to
the planet Mercury, with the mission of preaching to the strange rock creatures there, all in the non-air. But somehow, the spaceship hither had left without him. He cringed at the closeness of the call, and resolved there and then to avoid any sort of beverage or condiment that may be vulnerable to – spiking. Because, that’s what had to have happened.

  The ride had been too weird, too near the edge. He had no idea who had committed the act or why. The only truth was that he would be vigilant. And how? Rigid discipline! That is what he must apply.

  But, but, why had this happened? Why had his vigilance failed? Was he not endeavoring to proceed in his life in the only direction possible: upward?

  Or at least forward.

  In the bad old days of his long disparagement and devolution, he had indeed learned many lessons. Perhaps that was why he learned one instantaneously now. He was a DRUG ADDICT, with the added horror of its companion specter: DRUG WITHDRAWAL.

  After all, he had been a victim in this affair from the start. The horrid person who had had a bit of fun by subjecting him to this hazard would have to be horsewhipped. For was it not the odious Sharlie who had made Becky the agent of attack by way of his heartlessness, and his rejection of her devotion?

  However, Butterbugs would never know that that very person was in fact lying in the county morgue, a victim himself of his own strict overdose of drug-ish cocktail. A campaign of heart attackage had pummeled his ticker into red meat paste. Pure-O coke’ll do it every time.

  As for Becky, she now rested comfortably on a pink taffeta cushion, safe in a Brentwood villa, having survived multiple little deaths gifted by her many admirers.

  Destiny! Thy Will be done!

  That was all well and good, but the fact was, Butterbugs, under the ten-ton hoof of this particular drug’s chemistry (combined with some other issues not so readily known), had turned into a baffled, shambling goon. It wasn’t as if his previous sequences of altered persona, whether in the Gobbtown dumps, the stretches off-Melrose, the waste ground near the Vegas Strip, or a certain spot on Santa Monica, or the Russel Arms, or at the base of the Funeral Mountains, were so pronounced as this one was. Nothing could compare. Today he was utterly advanced in the recklessness of his behavior. That’s why a net was thrown over him within the median of Westemberley Drive on the plains of prosperity before the Beverly Hills, after he tried to aim and then fire a rifle-shaped assemblage of palm fronds at a series of VIP limousines. The final straw came when a SWAT team, trained in social disturbance duty, made the capture after the culprit refused to give up his last redoubt amidst some monoxide-flocked Whentworth-shrubs.

  Visiting hours. In hospital.

  Treatment having been implemented after blood work, a tipping point had passed.

  The facts were simple. Butterbugs had been saved. Pulled back from the heights of destruction. An enlightened hospital social worker (who professionally insisted on remaining anonymous to the Press), having seen the pattern, recommended and finally got permission to proceed with immediate detoxification on a heroic level, rather than immediate and radical psychosurgery, as vociferously advocated by the attending physician, one Dr. Hair.

  Result: due to his inherent strengths of body and character, patient was responding well. Status: shaken, but resting quite comfortably. Legal status: free, with no pending lawsuits.

  His nurse was Shway Tue, of Tibeto-Burmese parentage, with beige bark smeared on her broad cheeks. She had eyes like shiny hematite disks, set in roundels of lampblack dusting. Her lips were as two sets of two tiny carrots, stacked sideways, two-by-two, pointed ends at left and right. And the ends curved upwards, in a smile that radiated warmth and Welcome Back to the Planet Earth.

  He was enchanted.

  ‘We kind of thought you were going to leave us there for a while, Mr. Butterbugs. I’m glad you didn’t disappoint us.’

  She laid a sprig of straw-colored bibsey-bells, framed with a wreath of dark zinberry leaves, on his wheeled tray/table, then left.

  His own eyes welled, then overflowed.

  The doctor in attendance, Dr. Hair, whose visage was less than describable, replaced her welcome mien with his own.

  ‘I can’t say I agree with the choices made by this bureaucracy as far as your course of treatment is concerned, Patient. Quite frankly, I feel that you should be legally classified as an intractable and habitual vagrant and stripped of your civil rights, after your shameful display on Westemberley Drive, an arterial that I happen to take my children on regularly. For the sake of public safety, types like you need to be addressed with some degree of justified harshness. How else are we to eradicate the problems types like you generate, that make our society so sick? I very strongly urge you to embrace corrective brain surgery that includes psychotic correction benefits. I cannot myself possibly take you on in this respect, but I know a terrific team that will assume control. I don’t often do this to a Patient, but I just can’t go on being a Christian doctor without saying it. You were involved with incredibly dangerous drugs, young one. I wholly disapprove of you Hollywood types, who do so with such incredible relish.’

  Shway Tue returned with a fruit package and smiled.

  ‘Excuse me, doctor,’ Butterbugs managed to articulate. ‘But, where am I?’

  ‘At Seniors/Cyanide Hospital,’ he replied impassively. ‘In Hollywood.’

  ‘Just making sure…’

  ‘Yes? Well? Yes?’

  ‘Are you not, then, a ‘Hollywood type’, yourself?’

  ‘I’m finished with this Patient, nurse. Finished, I say!’

  The first person that had called upon him once he regained his senses was Cody.

  Cody! She was heart-stopping. And today, right after Dr. Hair was ‘finished’, she was back. It was her second visit, because the first time, there was nothing he as patient could do yet.

  ‘I saw you!’ he raised his arms from the bed. ‘You were there. You were part of my dream, but not of my nightmare. I tried to follow you toward the light, the light behind your profile. I tried, but I could not!’

  His arms lowered, and she drew close.

  They wept.

  ‘But now, you! You are here! Are you, then, real?’

  ‘I am,’ she replied steadily. ‘As true as any truth in the universe!’

  She took his hand and placed it on her breast, skin to skin.

  They laughed.

  ‘Oh!’ Butterbugs nearly shouted for joy. ‘You restore me! I cannot but laugh out my elation!’

  ‘And my relief!’

  ‘Oh yeah, baby, yeah!’

  ‘And there’s something else, Butterbugs,’ she said amidst her tears.

  ‘Yea, loved one?’

  ‘Exciting news, Butterbugs. We’re going to do a thorough follow-up. We found out that you’ve also got another condition, which has shown up in your blood work. So I had a brainstorm. A specialist in New York is going to examine you. It’s all set. Hyman’s bankrolling the whole thing, from start to finish. I worked it out. Talked him into it. You fly LAX to JFK in two days’ time.’

  ‘Dear lady, I can scarce believe it! To be cared for by you! Tell me, sacred-Cody, how did you find out about me, in my dark hour?’

  ‘Oh, that!’ she chuckled. ‘I read about you in some horrible, condescending article in that rag ‘The Hammer Report’. Thought I could ride to the rescue. And what’s more, Hyman backed me! Can you believe it? Probably because Goth owns the ‘Hammer’, and the big boys wouldn’t want to miss the ‘opp’ to grandstand. You know, following your story and all. They wanted you to go down in flames, but we’re going to head them off at the pass. Such a cynical business I’m in! But that’s what it took to save you from –’

  She wrinkled her fine face with mock abomination.

  ‘From, shall we say – the fires of perdition!’

  ‘I knew you were a wonder. I knew it the first time I saw you.’

  ‘I knew it, too!’

  ‘Cody, I love it when you compliment yourself.’r />
  ‘Well,’ she replied, with pursed, coy lips, ‘I heard Hyman’s ‘Great ass!’ pass as I closed the door of his office that day when you were first there. Thought you might agree with his assessment.’

  ‘Oh, Cody, you’re great all over!’

  They loved each other. She climbed into the bed, and found his erection, and proceeded with zeal. She kissed him, and then, with grace and elegance, she left.

  They would always work together. Always love one another. So they moved along.

  Then, he was ensconced in a First Class seat on a reputable airline, bound for his maiden landing in the Big Apple. A landmark decision – which could not have been made without the Cody accord. Butterbugs chose, with a new consciousness, not to make his recent substance abuse a further issue in his life, let alone the principal issue.

  (He’d leave that to the Baby Boomer generation.)

  And that was that.

  …and there you have it. That is how it happened. A simple tale of stupidity in action. Because, that’s what the movies are all about, isn’t it? Action!

  Yet another forgettable item in the blotter of countless Hollywood debaucheries. But hark! It might have well occurred in Rasp Patch, Delaware! Or probably even in your own town. Hollywood’s corrupt claws spread, as surely as demon rum, unto the dooryards of the great American average.

  So shame, shame on these strolling players, whom we often idolize in the private dark of our picture shows. Do not bend to their will, I warn you!

  (This Reporter wishes to thank Dr. Hurburt Harkee Hair for his generous assistance in writing this story for American readers to wonder at. ‘The Hammer Report’ cares so much for Americans, it sometimes hurts!)

  But this takes place later on – Other things happen first…

  Prelude:

  Intermission