Individually Wrapped Horrors

by Eric Joel Kleinschmidt, Sr.

  “Hey Jen! Can you bring me a roll of toilet paper and a wash cloth? Please?” He yelled. She hissed under her breath and began taking her things out to the car. Coming back in to get the last two bags, he came barrel-assing out into the living room, still pulling on his jean shorts. He had on no shirt and was a road map of ICP tattoos. She stopped as he grabbed her arm. “What the fuck? Why are you leaving?” She dropped the bags and lost her shit. She turned on him scolding:

  “Why? Why? What the fuck is wrong with you, Vic? Look at my fucking car! You are such an asshole and I’m fucking tired of this shit! I’m leaving and you can go fuck yourself!” He looked at the car and rubbed his temples at the same time, wincing every time she yelled at him. He knew immediately how bad he had fucked up.

  “Come on, Jen, it was all in fun. I’ll get it taken care of. I love the shit out of you. Please don’t leave.” She looked at his chest.

  “You love me? You fucking love me, huh? Where’s the tattoo to prove it? You sure as fuck have proven how much you love them,” she said pointing at his ink. He looked down at himself and back at her with confusion.

  “You’re pissed I have tattoos? You fucking have tattoos, too!”

  “I have three tattoos and one of them is a ruby—your fucking birthstone—with your fucking initials tattooed over it! You have nothing on you about me! All I get is a fucking car with graffiti all over it! All I get is a fucking car with dead animals rotting in the back seat! I’m fucking done.” She calmed down a bit having it out there like that. “I’m done. I’m not coming back. I’m just glad we don’t have any kids together. That’s it. That’s all.” She picked up her bags. He stood dumbfounded, looking at the gravel driveway.

  “Well, how am I supposed to get to work and everything?” She gave him a backwards finger and kept walking.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. Maybe your brother can come get you. Goodbye, Vic,” she said, getting into the car and slamming the door. He stood in the driveway in his jean shorts as the car backed out of the drive and she sped away out of his life forever. He knew where she was going and he knew he wasn’t going to get her back. Dark clouds began to form in his mind. He never knew it.

  ****

  The months went by in a slow-dragging crawl. His work suffered, his trailer suffered, his friendships suffered, his hygiene suffered. His brother had tried to set him up with a girl that he knew from work. Vic didn’t even want to know her name. There was actually quite a bad falling out between Vic and Vincent. A number of names were called and hateful things said, some of which could never be taken back. Vincent quit coming around. A thirty-something down the way in the trailer park would come up and try getting into Vic’s pants, but he shut her down every time. She finally got the hint and quit coming around also. He drank bottle after bottle of vodka, bound and determined that if he couldn’t have Jen, he didn’t want anyone else either, not friend or family or lover. He finally lost his job at the shoe factory after many attendance reports and ended up working the drive-thru at a local burger pit. He had no car, no prospects, no hopes, no dreams. Nothing interested him. He felt like there was nothing good left in this life. The only ICP songs he would listen to were the sad or overly angry ones aimed at a woman. A bitch! Like his bitch! He loved her. He fucking hated her to death! He was going out of his mind. He had gotten word a few weeks ago that Jen had started seeing this older guy. He had a nice house and an SUV for fuck’s sake! Something broke in him that day.

  He now spent all of his waking hours thinking about her having sex with some new guy. Probably not even giving a shit about the time they had together. He felt like she had cheated on him because in his mind, he had always known they’d be together until they were old and grey and grandparents. She gave up on him when he was in a bad way. He fucking hated her more and more every single day. He would pace the living room, the bedroom, the driveway. He would spend hours looking at pictures of her on his phone. It had been shut off weeks ago now, but he kept it charged up so he could look at her often.

  The 5th of October, a guy at work told him that his cousin works with his ex now and that she was getting married. They were also expecting their first child early next year. She was truly and completely done with him. He was done, too. That afternoon, he got off work and walked over to the pharmacy. He bought the largest bottle of sleeping pills he could find. On his way home, he used the last of his cash to buy two large bottles of vodka. He walked home in a haze of sorrow and hatred. Mostly he felt this toward himself though. He still loved her with all of what remained of his heart. No other woman had ever held a candle to her. She had loved him through all of the shit and through all of the good times and now the good times were over forever. It was time for him to own up to his fuck up. It was time for him to let her go, once and for all. He walked home.

  That evening, he began with a few shots to set the mood. He had a mix cd of the saddest tracks he could find from ICP. He played it on repeat as every so often he downed a few of the pills with a vodka chaser. He had read somewhere before that if you took them all at once—like in the movies—your body rejected them, then ejected them. So he was taking his sweet time, remembering everything he could of their time together. The first concerts that they went to together, both ICP and various other rock and metal bands. Every time they had gone to movies and bars together, partying with friends, hanging out with each other’s families. Wrestling, snuggling, kissing and hugging. Fucking. She had such an amazing body that just to see her fresh from the shower would get him as hard as a rock. He had had a few other fuck buddies in his late teens into his early twenties, but when she came along, that shit all stopped. She was his only true love. She had at one point understood and even supported his Juggalo lifestyle and now she was with a guy who probably didn’t even know what Faygo was. He downed a few more pills and took a few more drinks. He had a bag of chips he grabbed from the cupboard that he was also munching on to help keep everything down, but mostly it was pills and booze. At one point, he felt the rising urge to piss. He went to get up and thought, nah, fuck it. This is where they’ll find me and I’ll probably have shit myself on top of everything else so fuck it! Fuck it!! He sat on his smelly old couch in dirty sweat pants and a stained old Marilyn Manson tee shirt and intentionally pissed his pants. He sat squishing around it. He was well on his way to drunk now and feeling every bit of it and thought it was the funniest feeling he had ever experienced.

  Long into the evening, the cd player still bumping the same tired sad songs, he felt like his legs were made of rubber. He tried to stand up at one point and fell sideways back onto the piss-soaked couch laughing like a loon. They were going to find him in a state, all right! He didn’t care. He could just give a fuck less. This life was so great and full of joy and everything in life he had ever hoped to achieve. She chose a different life. Maybe he’d get a new life, too. Like reincarnation. That would be cool. He felt himself slipping off into a doze. It was light at first, but felt like it wanted to be a full-on nod off. He grabbed the bottle of sleeping pills to take a few more and found the bottle of 100 capsules was empty. He drunkenly threw it across the floor. He picked up the mostly empty bottle of vodka. The other bottle lay empty on the floor, one more dead soldier. He up-ended the bottle and swallowed the last few ounces. He took it and threw it at the cd player, amazingly hitting it squarely in the front. The cd skipped and stopped playing. ERROR flashed on the screen.

  “Error. That’s me,” he said to no one. “I am an error. I’m a nerror. A nerror tha’sh about to be fished,” he slurred. His face began to grow warm and yet numb. He suddenly had the first faint clangings of warning bells going off in his head, but they were far off and unimportant. He felt nervous, but mostly he just felt tired. He thought he might just lay down and take a little nap and, in the morning, after one motherfucker of a hangover, he’d get up and un-fuck his life. He thought he’d start by calling up Jen and congratulating her. He thought he’d…

  He got th
at far, then there was nothing.

  ****

  Whispers in the darkness…nothing…ghosts of familiar faces flashing by…no sound…falling slowly into hazy smoke…a blinking red strobe light…unfamiliar faces fading in and out, talking, but still no sound…an angel with a butcher knife that looked like Jen…twelve faces of skeletons flashed by in a blur…a few familiar notes of music…the very distant, very soft warble of a siren…someone yelling at the top of their lungs but the volume turned all the way down to one…the weirdest sensation of lying flat on his back, yet drifting through the air forward, wherever that was… Was this being re-born? Was this dying? He didn’t care. There was no pain. No worries. No anything. Just these odd sensations and sounds from a great distance away. Then, nothing.

  ****

  He slowly opened crusty, sleep-weary eyes. He lay perfectly still, trying to focus on anything he could manage. It was dim wherever he was. Soft light. His focus sharpened slightly and he was looking up at a ceiling that had the lights turned off. The soft light was coming from another room. He slowly, carefully turned his head. There was a window. The blinds were drawn, but he could see that it was dark outside. He managed his head around from side to side and saw he was in a hospital room. His hands began sending signals via the nerves to his brain again and he found the stinging sensation of the sleeping limb beginning to wake up. He also found that he was restrained to the bed he currently lay upon. He licked his dry, bitter tongue against even drier cracked lips. His mouth tasted like ass. There was a sticky film of drool dried to a paste on his lips and he couldn’t wipe it off. He turned his head as far as he could and wiped it against the pillow. A hospital. OK. He looked down to see if there was a call button. There was not.

  “Hello,” he croaked and his throat shot fire up at him. He winced at the pain and the even worse taste coming up from his throat. He limply rattled his bed rail and continued his dry, raspy cry. “Hello? Nurse? Anybody?” He winced again and while doing so, a nurse walking by making her rounds heard him rattling the rail. She stopped and looked in. She then turned and stepped into the room.

  “Good evening, young man,” she said, looking over his chart. “You gave us quite a scare. How are you feeling?” He frowned up at her. “Yeah, that’s to be expected. You’re in St. Stephen’s. We had to pump your stomach. You’re lucky to be alive. That’s a lot of nothing good you put in there.” She smiled prettily at him and went back to reading his chart. It wasn’t lost on him. Even in his roughened-up state, he knew a look.

  “So what happened then? I mean, how did I get here?”

  The smile faded slightly as she replied, “Your…neighbor. Says she’s your ex-girlfriend.” At this, he chuckled sorely.

  “My neighbor,” he croaked, “is delusional. I must’ve told that methhead no fifty times already.” The smile returned and they talked for a few minutes more before a doctor walked in.

  “Hey, Doctor Fitzsimmons, pulled the night shift again, huh?” They exchanged a brief smile. Vic noted that it wasn’t the type of smile she had given him. She handed the chart to the doctor who replied, “All week. How are we feeling tonight, Mr. Vanderfelt?” Vic smiled at that.

  “I don’t know about you, doc, but I feel pretty goddamned stupid. Other than that, shiny side up.” He gave the doctor a weak thumbs up and the doctor nodded.

  “I hope that you feel that way. Not because I want you to feel stupid, but because I don’t want to see you back on this bed. Or on the slab in the morgue either. I’m recommending counseling. There’s a pretty good head shrinker right here in the building, unless you have one of your own. If you have one, may I recommend a different one?” The nurse smiled almost apologetically at that one, but no—there it was again. A twinkle in her eye and something other in the smile. He dismissed it.

  “Yeah, doc. Look, I have no intentions of doing that again. Whatever was in my brain that drove me to that, I have exorcised that demon.” The doctor nodded again.

  “Still, we have you on a 48-hour patient watch so you’ll be here until tomorrow morning, then it’s up to the 6th floor with you for two days. In that two days, I’m going to put you on a strict diet. Your nurse up there will go over it with you. Plenty of water and rest, but mix it up with a few sit ups and push-ups. Then you’ll be scheduled for a psych eval before you check out.” He returned the chart to the end of the bed and said, “All right, big guy, get some sleep. I’ll peek in at you in the morning before I leave.” He shook hands with Vic and made his escape. The nurse finished a few odd jobs that he really wasn’t sure she was in charge of and then with a polite sigh she said, “OK, then. I’m all done in here, too.” She handed him the buzzer. “You’ll get the restraints off in the morning. Sorry.” He shrugged and smiled again. “I hope you know that whoever she was, she was a damn fool. Hope you don’t mind me saying so.” He shook his head slowly in utter disbelief. “I have to go now. Duty calls. I’ll peek back in at you later also. Have a good night and try to get some sleep, OK?” Still stunned, he vaguely remembered nodding when replaying this scene in his head. She got to the door and opened it. She walked out, but stopped just outside the door and did the craziest thing. Kind of a Juggalo/Juggalette rally cry. She sang out, “Whoop, whoop!” then let the door close behind her. Get the fuck outta here, was all that kept replaying in his thoughts. Get the fuck outta here! I overdosed on sleeping pills and wake up to a Juggalette angel! I must’ve died and gone to Shangri-La! The restraints told him otherwise though. No, he was right here on good old terra firma. Just may be the luckiest son of a bitch ever though.

  No, he pulled himself out of that line of thinking. I would just fuck things up again and maybe finish the job this time. Got to get myself right with my life first. The first thing he thought to do was to get ahold of Vincent and apologize until his lips and tongue went numb. Kiss his God-awful smelling feet if need be. That was step one. Step two, gotta quit fucking around in fast food. Hit another factory and all the O.T. he could muster until he could afford a car, then he needed to try to get on with some type of schooling. College or more like a trade or tech school. Make something of himself. He supposed that the very first thing though was the counseling. Without getting his head right, none of that other shit was going to last for very long. No, Nurse Juggalette was going to have to wait. He thought if he explained things as they were, she would understand. Hell, maybe he read the whole goddamned thing wrong anyway. Maybe she really was just being friendly and happened to be a fan also. Maybe it meant nothing. He needed some sleep. Decide what to say to her in the morning. He was only really sure about one thing in this crazy fucked up life of his…she would probably be visiting in his dreams that night.

  She did. And it was everything in his poor tired brain that he hoped it would be.

  ****

  And the days drift by, slowly spinning and twirling around us for the briefest of moments, letting us barely catch the beauty from the corner of our eye, then floating on by to make way for the next days to drift in and around and by—and so on. The young boy has become the full-grown man, now. Still covered in ink, but not so skinny a body any longer. A middle-aged spare tire hangs around his waist, stretching some of his tattoos into comic representations of their former selves. Inevitably it would seem, he has developed a well-endowed set of moobs. That’s man-boobs to the layperson. The brown spiked hair he once had had gone half grey and thinned out a bit, especially in the front and a nice shiny spot on the top. He mostly wore baseball caps now. And this…oh, this cruel fate that only the most sick and sadistic of creator’s could ever hand out to such a fly guy…he was now a used car salesman. Oh, the humanity! He found on a whim that he was actually really good at it. He and Dana (Nurse Juggalette) had bought it from her father and he was actually very honest and trustworthy to buy from. He covered most of the tatts with business suits and button-ups now. His shoulders slouched quite a bit more now than ever before and sometimes it took him awhile to urinate. He’d had kidney stones and his
gall bladder removed and a whole laundry list of other defects to contend with. The main thing though was that he was such a happy guy these days. Their daughter, Lucy, would come by to visit on her way to work. She was 19 now and shacking up with some boy from her college, but hell, who was he to judge? No grandkids yet, but you never know what the future has in store.

  He loved to collect things from nature now. He had a most impressive rock and rare gem collection, all found—nothing bought. He still had the old ICP cd collection, but mostly he stuck with the classics these days: Skynyrd, The Stones, Led Zep, etc. He had also developed a keen appreciation for Celtic music. That was a bolt of lightning from out of nowhere. He had a work bench out in his garage and he loved to sit out there and tinker with old antiques and listen to some classics and when Dana came out to see him, he stopped whatever he was doing and just danced with her. He loved more than anything to just dance with her. Sober now going on twenty years solid, no falling off the wagon for this guy. She loved him for his courage and all the leaps and bounds he had made in his and their life. He had a special tattoo—the only one he got since Jen—that had his and her initials in a heart with a Hatchetman on one side and a Hatchetgirl on the other. Just below, there was a Hatchetbaby on an old wooden swing hanging from the heart. The baby’s shirt had their daughter’s initials on it. He was so in love with his family, it was crazy. He never in his life would have guessed that this was what life could be like. No more wild days, just time with the real fam. On cool, breezy nights, he’d go out in the back yard and sit on his bench. They could see the river from their house. He would think about all the steps and struggles to get here; here, where he finally knew what home was.