“Would be impossible to find, either way,” Candy pointed out. “They had no idea where the accident occurred. Thing could be practically anywhere. Someone probably already found it already, too. On its way to Arabia via the black market, is my guess.”
Connor inhaled the last of the roach. “Well that’s a shame. Could have made us all millionaires. Too bad.”
“Ugh,” Johnny moaned. He didn’t need to say anymore; they had heard his rants enough times as it was. When it came to wealth, he would much rather be sleeping in a dumpster feeding off the trash of middle-class. He knew money ended up doing horrible things to people in the long run. It just wasn’t worth it.
“Okay, fine,” Connor said. “Then it could have at least helped get us some free drugs.”
Johnny nodded in approval.
“Either way, this conversation is pointless, and now I’m gonna be late for practice.”
Addison smiled and grabbed his hand. “No one in your band is ever on time.”
“Today could be different,” Connor said. Then: “Well, maybe I have time for one more blunt.”
“Attaboy.” Addison reached in her purse for a roller.
“Thounds fun,” Johnny said, “but it’th almoth time for dinner. They’ll eat mine if I’m not there.” Johnny reached over and gave Candy Blossom a quick kiss. “Thee ya later.”
“’Bye, baby,” she said.
Johnny stood up and jogged away from the park. Connor called out, “Oh c’mon, man, get back here. We won’t respect you unless you get high!”
* * * * *
Johnny Desperation lived in a small bungalow located in the projects of Loathing, Illinois. The house was decorated with a gateless fence, dead grass, and five year-old Christmas lights no one ever found the energy to take down. A plastic Santa Claus riding a sleigh rested on the edge of the roof, its facial features long melted away by the tyranny of the sun. On the left side of the house, toward the top, resided a large black circle. These were the leftovers marked by the vicious fireballs of a roman candle. One summer a gang of wasps had set up a hive there, and no one could afford any Raid. They did have some spare fireworks hanging around from the previous Fourth of July, though. Worked just about the same.
Johnny stopped in front of his bungalow at the mailbox. The mail had probably arrived a few hours ago, but he seriously doubted anyone had thought of checking. After all, that would require walking at least twenty feet. Possibly twenty-five. And he was right: the box was filled with numerous fast food coupons and letters with large red block letters stamped across the front. He shuffled through the envelopes until his vision came across one reading EVICTION NOTICE.
He quickly tore the top open and unfolded the sheet inside. His eyes scanned through the page, widening as they neared the end. He figured they were behind on rent, but seven months late? The landlord was some kind of saint to have tolerated it as long as he had. Johnny studied the dreadful sentence in the middle of the long, dragging paragraph:
The occupants of the aforementioned residence will have no longer than the 15th of September to either pay the sum of $13,000 to amend for outrageous late fees or vacate the premises.
Johnny slammed the lid shut with all his might. It took one bounce off the mailbox and flung right off its hinges. It landed with a clang on the road. He looked up at the sky and sighed.
Shit.
Inside the bungalow, it was the usual scene. Johnny walked through the door and was instantly bombarded by the eager tongue of their beloved pit bull, Zooey Deschanel.
He found his father sitting on his La-Z-Boy in the corner, smoking his pipe and playing Age of Empires on the cheap desktop they’d scavenged from a garage sale years ago.
“Hey, Dad.” Johnny waved his hand out in front of him.
“Fuckin’ Brits are going down!” Roland Desperation responded, and relit his pipe. He seemed to light the thing more than he actually smoked it.
Johnny shrugged and headed toward the kitchen, passing his older brother on the couch, who kicked at his legs. “Move!” James shouted. “I’m watching TV.”
Johnny paused and glanced at the television set across from them. “It’th a commerthal,” he said. “For a Big Mac.”
James stared at his younger brother with impatience. “I love Big Macs.”
Johnny studied the folds of fat peeking from under his shirt. “I can thee that.”
“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”
He found his mother in the small narrow closet calling itself a kitchen. She was hovering over the stove, busting open a packet of macaroni and cheese and breaking into a sweat from the strenuous workout.
“Stop picking on your older brother’s weight problem,” Ruth Desperation ordered, panting like an Olympic runner. “You know he’s just big-boned. Like his momma.”
Johnny shoved the envelope in his mother’s hands and waited for her to read it. But instead of attempting such a difficult task, she just stared at her son blankly.
“What’s this?”
“Eviction notice.”
“Weird, we’ve been getting a lot of those lately.” Ruth tossed the mail in the garbage can and returned to the macaroni boiling away on the stove.
“Don’t you think thith ith a little therious, Mom?”
“What’s that, dear?”
“The eviction notice.”
“Oh.”
“Well?”
Ruth waved her hand away. “Nah, it’s no biggie.”
“No biggie? We only have ‘til the thiffteennth, Mom!”
“Until what?”
Johnny slapped his hand against the refrigerator and pushed the eviction notice back into his mother’s hands. He pointed at the last three words of the sentence that had stood out the most to him:
…vacate the premises.
Ruth scrunched her face up as if utterly lost. “Vacate? Like…like a vacation?”
Johnny studies his mother’s face to determine whether or not she was being serious. He sighed and wondered how someone could be so blonde without actually being blonde.
He explained the letter again.
“Oh,” Ruth whispered. “So that’s what they meant.”
She shrugged and went back to the noodles. Johnny bit back his lower lip, anything to resist the urge to grab his mother by her throat and shake her uncontrollably. “Mom!” he exclaimed.
“Relax, dear,” she said. “All will be well.”
“How? We don’t have that kind of money.”
“Oh, I’m sure a certain large sum is about to hit us soon enough…”
“Not the lotto again.” Johnny sighed. He dropped his head down a bit and rubbed his temple. She played the same goddamn numbers again and again, every week. They weren’t even particularly meaningful numbers. In fact, they were the dumbest numbers possible.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. The magic formula, according to Ruth Desperation.
Here they were, about to lose the house, and she was wasting money on a set of digits that would never be chosen as the winner ever—not in this life, or the next.
He felt his mother’s stubby fingers fall on his shoulder. He looked up and caught her eyes. It was obvious she was trying her best to make them as reassuring as possible, and it was a little eerie how much they actually were.
“Have faith.” She forced a wooden spoonful of the pot’s contents into her son’s closed mouth, which had since been drained and stirred with cheap Velveeta. “Now taste this and tell me you’ve tasted pasta more perfect than this.”
Johnny gave her the thumbs up. Ruth smiled proudly. He had to admit, he hadn’t had macaroni and cheese this good in a while. Sure, they’d had the same thing yesterday, and the day before that, and so on—but all of those times it had been absolutely awful. Tonight, however, something was different. He was pretty sure it was the sudden change from SpongeBob noodles to dinosaur ones. There’s just something special about chomping the cheesy head off a miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex.<
br />
It was almost time for the drawing, so everyone gathered together in the living room with their individual TV dinner trays. Ruth took the remote from James and turned on the news. Johnny sat in the corner of the room on the floor, picking at his food. Somehow hunger had escaped him.
Zooey Deschanel lay on her stomach beside Johnny, eagerly thumping her tail against the carpet. She anticipated each noodle he flung at her with immense excitement.
“Goddamn turncoat fucks!” Roland yelled at his computer. “I’ll murder you with a catapult!”
The sudden outburst had sprayed bits of cheddar all over his beard. He didn’t pay any attention to this, though. There were still turncoats left to murder with catapults, after all.
“Rollie, now you hush up,” Ruth snapped. “I’m ‘bout to win us some millions.” Her face was serious, even though she held in her lap a porcelain Aunt Jemima doll. It was, in fact, her favorite doll out of her whole collection. She was rotating between giving herself bites of the macaroni and bites to the Aunt. Of course, the doll possessed zero orifices, so the food just smooshed together against the glass into one big mess.
Roland took his eyes away from the computer screen to his wife. He watched the scene with annoyance. “Woman, you are insane.”
“The rich are always crazy, dear. Just you wait and see.”
They all quieted down as the host began to draw balls from the machine. The first was quite an odd number: 1.
The one that followed was even odder, despite being very even at the same time: 2.
The rest…well, the rest was lunacy. One by one the numbers popped up, each digit collating within its own numerical order. After it was over everyone just sat there, bodies numb, staring at the screen. The numbers flashed before their eyes over and over again.
There was a 1. There was a 2. There was a 3. There was a 4. And there was a 5. And sure enough, next to the mega ball slot, there shone a heavenly 6.
Even the newscaster was speechless. There simply were no words to fully express the amount of confusion the country was suddenly experiencing.
Johnny let go of his bowl and it tumbled to the floor. Zooey Deschanel was quick to leap on top of it and play vacuum cleaner.
James literally fainted.
Roland dropped his glass of cream soda and it exploded at his feet.
Ruth turned to her husband. “Those things are expensive, for crying out loud.” She sighed and told the Aunt to open up wide.
A Few Weeks Before Now:
Fun with Grapes
Johnny Desperation’s life did a one-eighty.
Growing up, money had always been an evil entity invented to manipulate the good to become bad. Now he realized all that thinking had merely been his natural teenage angst rebelling against society. After experiencing it firsthand, he knew that luxuries weren’t in fact such a bad thing, after all.
As soon as they’d cashed that first paycheck they packed their few belongings and went house searching. They moved from Loathing to a nice gated community off in Libertyville about a half hour away. It was a small suburb devoted entirely to large mansions. The idea that the Desperation family now qualified seemed cathartic to the mind. It was a pleasant change from the direction the family had previously been heading.
He’d never seen a house so big. Hell, Zooey Deschanel’s new doghouse out back was larger than his old bedroom altogether. The Desperations went on a spending spree, buying everything deemed valuable by today’s standards. Ruth purchased her very own fountain of chocolate syrup that she kept in the center of the kitchen on display for all to see. They never did get an actual dinner table. They all thought it to be foolish thinking. After all, everyone knew the best place to eat was in front of their new seventy-two inch Sony. Ruth also went to an antique store and bought every single doll they had in stock, and then proceeded to buy everything in Amazon’s stock. She was acquiring quite the collection. However, Aunt Jemima would always remain her favorite out of the lot.
Roland hired a team of electricians to transform their new basement into some kind of technological laboratory. Each wall consisted of giant computer screens. It was all the makings of expensive equipment that, in truth, he didn’t understand in the slightest bit, but, hey, it looked cool. He soon traded in his old history-based war games for something much more entertaining. Instead of murdering Vikings to death with catapults, Roland now slaughtered trolls and warlocks with his large enchanted axe. Now that they had finally come into some dough, he had enough for the monthly subscription of his World of Warcraft game he had received as a Christmas gift some years ago. Needless to say, he was instantly hooked.
At first, Johnny was too overwhelmed to comprehend what was going on. He saw his name in the news; people were stopping on the street to talk to him; they were no longer having macaroni and cheese for dinner. His parents offered to buy him the one thing he had always wanted in life, but when he sat and thought about it, he wasn’t exactly sure what it was he wanted. After all, they had already gotten him the new iPhone. What more could Johnny possibly need?
Johnny had made the assumption rich people never went to school. He quickly found this fact to be very false when, a week after moving into Libertyville, his mother signed him up at a nearby private school. As it turned out, rich people just went to schools designed for rich people.
They actually had to wear suits. Suits. Johnny cringed at himself every morning while getting dressed. He never thought in a million years he’d be caught dead in a suit. But as it turned out, he actually looked pretty good in them. They were sort of sophisticated feeling.
Johnny first day at his new school passed like a dream.
The teachers didn’t give you math lessons. Instead they taught you how to do your taxes. How to play it smart in politics. The keys to a successfully economy. In a world in where numbers valued over anything else, you either simplified or simply died. Instead of reading Shakespeare, they gave you a biography of Steve Jobs. His first homework assignment had been to write an essay on the Wall Street Crash of ’29 and how it could have been prevented if actual enlightened human beings had been in charge instead of the monkeys running the system back in the day.
Researching the paper, he found himself wondering if the crash’s effects were really possible. Could such a thing actually happen? He shuddered at the idea of his country falling victim to some kind of sci-fi depression like this story portrayed.
He saw faces that at first he assumed to be constructed only of greed, promising himself never to socialize with these people. But, by the end of his first week, he had become friends with most of the kids attending the school. He even got a girlfriend. Of course, he was pretty positive she was only interested in him because his name was in the newspaper, but Johnny was willing to ignore that fact as long as she continued taking off her clothes. And he was pretty sure she would.
Memories of his previous life quickly faded away like a bad dream.
Everything is always like a dream, Johnny once thought, except for actual dreams.
A few weeks attending this school—or “academy”, as the faculty insisted calling it—Johnny ran into a group of obese Goths throwing grapes down an empty hallway. There were three of them, in the same required uniform as he but with stereotypical Goth black makeup, and they all seemed very intent on throwing those grapes. There was a whole stash of the fruit in a backpack they passed between them. He stood there for a while, watching as each one exploded into a tiny grenade of juice twenty or so feet away.
After around the fiftieth grape, Johnny couldn’t take anymore. “Watcha doin?” he asked.
“Throwing grapes,” said one of the Goths, a spiked dog collar strapped around his thick neck.
“At?”
“Dogs. Don’t you see them? They’re everywhere!”
Johnny looked around the hallway to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything. “Dogs?” All he saw was a whole lot of squashed grapes.
“Yeah, man, dogs,” said the
Goth in the middle. This one sported a spray painted devilock running between his eyes and down his snout of a nose. “They’re, like, everywhere. The stupid fascist janitor gave them the taste of human flesh and now they’re all over our shit. These grapes are the only things that’ll stop them. Trust us.”
“Oh.” Johnny thought for a moment. “Why grapes?”
“They’re laced with dog poison,” said devilock kid.
“Cool. Who spiked them?”
“One of us did. I can’t remember which one, though.”
“It’s doesn’t matter!” dog collar kid exclaimed. “We’re gonna show these conformist dogs what we’re made of!”
Johnny burst out laughing. “You guys are high as hell, aren’t you?”
The three Goths stopped throwing the grapes and turned around, completely serious. The one with a collar around his neck replied, “Well, yeah.”
Johnny nodded in approval. “Any left?”
The grape-throwers exchanged glances. Johnny noticed their teeth were stained purple. He did not want to know why. Devilock kid shrugged. “Sure, but be aware next time it’ll cost you. You’re not gonna find this shit on any given street.”
He reached in his single-strapped book bag and brought out a small black can. He handed the metallic object over and Johnny took it, puzzled. The thing looked like a can of body spray. He held it away from him like it was some kind of dead animal.
“What the hell is this?” he asked. “Tag?”
Devilock kid grinned. “In a way,” he said. “Only think of it as instead of making your body smell good, it makes your soul smell good. Ya know?”
“No, not really. How do I take it?”
“Just spray it in your mouth. The rest takes care of itself.”
Johnny raised the can and hesitated. “If this turns out to be Windex or something, I’m going to kick your ass.”
“Dude, it is a hundred times better than Windex,” said the one with the dog collar. “For real life.”
The tardy bell filled the remote hallway. It was like the gun of a race shooting off to signify it had officially begun. Well, here goes nothing, Johnny thought, opening his mouth and squeezing down on the can’s trigger.
Toxicity Page 2
