Fur and Loathing in Pittsburgh PA
A Savage Dive Deep into the Asshole of America
Release the Beast Within/
Take a piss on Humanity
-T-shirt slogans
We were somewhere in Beaver County when shit began to kick in. I remember mentioning something about the half-bottle of Robitussin I'd chugged. And suddenly, the entire sky in front of me was filled with what I can only call ``shithawks'' coming head-on at the car in a suicide run unheard of since the Japanese started experimenting with Divine Wind. They were all charging and flying at the car, splattering their bodies against it at hundreds of miles an hour, coating the windshield faster than the three-dollar Wal-Mart wipers could push them off. And there was a voice coming from everywhere that screamed ``WTF are these fucking animals doing? I can't see a goddamn thing!''
Then as suddenly as they appeared, they vanished, letting me finally see that I had somehow managed to keep our tiny car going in a straight line the entire time. My assistant, however, had opened his shirt and was slathering his chest with Jolt Cola, presumably in an attempt to cool off. I reached over and shut off the heater, wondering how long he'd been up to that on this early-July day. A man of his weight should watch his temperature, heat stroke is worst on the fatties.
``What the fuck are you talking about man?'' He stared at me, his lids barely open behind his cheap, plastic prescription lenses, something he'd yanked off the shelf at Target just so he could see the porn in front of him. I'd need to deal with the tag before we arrived, lest Dr. Samuel Conway smash them in a fit of Adam's Mark-induced rage. Can't go through a con when the only shithead capable of keeping my laptop running is blind as Dubya's policy analysts.
``Never mind, it's your turn to drive.'' I pulled the little blue car we'd nicknamed ``Suppository'' onto the shoulder of the road. No point in mentioning the shithawks, I thought. It'll be funnier to see the bastard hit a wave or two on this remote yet somehow overcrowded slice of freeway. All these people couldn't be going to Anthrocontm could they?
It was well past noon at this point, and we still had a long damn way to go. It was going to be a rough trip. At this point I was already in violation of every rule about ``heavy machinery'' mentioned on the side of that little red bottle, whereas my assistant had enough caffeine in his system to get an elephant dancing on its hind legs. Convenient, considering his size, until you noticed the way his gigantic sausage fingers wiggled and shook on the wheel, and the way his motions were quickly translated into vibrations of the car thanks to its incredibly tense handling. It was like riding in a constant, but minor, earthquake. But we had to keep going. Our reservation would become null and void if we didn't claim it by four PM. Null was bad enough, but void? Not with a head full of cough syrup, no sir. The thought of our room sinking into a thick, ink blackness of nothing just because we didn't have the decency to be punctual sent chills down my spine.
A friend of ours, confined to a wheelchair but with surprisingly deep pockets, had sent us out on this crazy, undesired trip to take photographs of fursuits, of which he was completely obsessed. He'd set us up with the room, prereg, and rented us a tiny but environmentally friendly hybrid vehicle since we'd had about enough of airport security since 9/11. Those bastards had stolen shit out of my bag for the last time. In any event, I had a duty to cover this event, and I always stick to my duties.
He'd also given me $300 in cash, which I had immediately squandered on supplies. Our trunk and backseat were a horrendous mish-mash of things only us truly lifeless nerds would even consider buying, much less consuming. Jolt Cola, NoDoz, caffeine inhalers from Japan, Pixy Stix and other assorted pure-sugar candies, enough chocolate to give every teenager in America a pizza face, and a myriad of over-the-counter and proscription drugs, capable of keeping you awake or putting you to sleep whenever necessary.
All of this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of crazy driving all around Madison's downtown area. We hit every little comic book shop, quickie mart and import store we knew of, and grabbed everything that $300 would allow. Not that we NEEDED all this shit for a single two-day convention, but when its not your money, you tend to avoid letting any of it go to waste.
The only thing that worried me was all the Robitussin we'd snagged, hitting up the legal limits of the stuff in several stores. There is nothing more dangerous than a twenty-something who's been tossing the tussin. And I knew that soon we'd both be digging our heels into that muck. I was already rolling in it, and my assistant would soon want to bring his ability to perceive reality up to the nastiness reality happened to actually be. The only way to keep going after that was to burn through our caffeine inhalers one at a time, slowly, to enable us to fight off the drowsiness even as we began to see things we hoped weren't actually there.
``This is the life, man,'' said my assistant. He leaned over and turned up the volume on the car stereo until the iPod he'd retrofitted into the damn thing was at its maximum volume. He sang along in a crazy, out-of-tune manner that only Ashcroft had ever gotten away with. ``Ai yi yi I'm your little butterfly...''
Butterflies? We were dealing with SHITHAWKS here. Giant, flying turds hell-bent on making us smell like a pack of babyfurs. Luckily, I could barely hear the shitty DDR music through my fancy, expensive headphones, especially since I'd turned Dr. Steel's ``Read-Along-Album'' all the way up to the top. For reasons I couldn't understand, my assistant had borrowed my iPod the night before we left, and filled the entire thing up with old 2Sense episodes, leaving me without Kobain, Radiohead, or the Kaizers until I had time to set up my laptop and correct this error. So I simply listened to Dr. Steel maintain his demented calls for world domination over and over as a sort of counterpoint to the dancy, poppy shit my assistant claimed was ``music.''
My assistant saw the hitchhiker long before I did. ``Shit, is that Frodo?''
``Of course not, you idiot. That's not Elijah Wood, it's Tobey Maguire.''
``Shit, well we can't leave Spiderman out in this heat, he'll melt just like your face is right about now.'' Before I could think up some reason to protest, I felt the car jerk into a poorly executed reverse, and then stop with bone-jarring urgency. The kid was obviously a fur, what with his Mickey Mouse T-shirt and pawprint luggage, but from the looks of it he hadn't sunk to the awful depths we had just yet. The poor bastard had a long way to fall before that sudden jolt at the end.
``Wow, when they left me on the side of the road this morning, I had no idea I'd get picked up by a hybrid! I've always wanted to ride in something earth-friendly!'' said the kid. I noticed that he was amazingly thin, despite his Tobey Maguire-like appearance. It must have been those eyes of his, they were hideously blue.
``Never ridden in a hybrid before? Well it's time you tasted the future!'' I said as the kid somehow managed to shove himself and his bags into our already overloaded backseat.
``Well we're not like your friends, we actually care about people.'' said my assistant. I became tense, sensing that the bastard was itching to set off some as-of-yet-hidden drama mine. There's at least one inside of every fur, or else they wouldn't be messed up enough to get involved with this depravity.
``No more of that or I'll toss you to the wolves, you bastard.'' He smirked, making me wonder if maybe he had a vore fetish he hadn't told me about. Luckily for us, there was no way Tobey could possibly hear us over the jolting, repetitive noise coming from our Blaupunkt speakers at top volume. Or could he?
How long could we keep up appearances, keep up anything approaching sanity in this condition? What will Tobey think when we lose it? Sordid tales of drug-induced murderers hell-bent on abduction, sodomy and murder plastered Fox News's screens every night, regardless of their truthfulness. Will he think back to those when I start yammering about shithawks? If so, we'll just have to force him to watch Barney until he kills himself, because it goes without saying that we can't unleash him with knowledge like that. He'd find some media-attention-starved cop desperate to get his face in the papers, who'd accuse us of crimes we didn't even know you could commit, then get us convicted by some Catholic judge who still believed homosexuality was a crime and that women had no souls.
Shit, did I just say that? Or did I just think it? Was I talking? Did anyone hear me? I sunk my teeth down into the hard-plastic Paper-Mate pen I'd end up chomping on for the next week or so. I have a terrible oral fixation and I must chew on things constantly. Behavior more suited for a mouse than a fox, I know, but I'm still sticking with a fox as my avatar. I like foxes. They're smart and cute and will eat just about anything. I know I'm only one of those three, but that's why we make-pretend instead of dealing with reality.
tm. I leaned around the seat and smiled in what I later realized was a very disturbing manner, staring deep into those hideously blue eyes of his. ``By the way, there's some things you must understand.'' He just stared at me blankly. I concluded his avatar must be a deer, the way he stood still in my headlights. ``CAN YOU HEAR ME?'' He nodded. ``That's good. Because I want you to know that we're going on this trip to find the New Hope for America. That's why a couple of people who should goddamn know better than to be in this fandom or at this con are going. It's the only way, you understand. Get it?'' He nodded again, though he was becoming visibly nervous.
``I want you to understand where I'm coming from. Because this is a very dangerous assignment. We may get ourselves thrown out of the fandom for this kind of shit...Hell, I forgot about all this cola. Want some?''
He shook his head. ``Caffeine allergy!''
``Well, how about some tussin?''
``Huh?''
tm this year, and so I knew some invisible force would make me go. Understand?''
Tobey just stood there blinking, staring at me with unknowing eyes. Great, not only was he a deer, he had chronic wasting disease. At least now I knew why the bastard was so goddamn skinny. I decided to keep talking.
``I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is my ASSISTANT! He's not just some random fur I met on the internet. I mean just look at him! He's nothing like you or me, because he's not from this country. He's Canadian, I think. But that doesn't matter, does it? I mean, you're not some goddamn flag-humping right wing cocksucker, are you?''
``O...Of course not...'' he stammered out.
``Of course you aren't. But in spite of his kanuk-y-ness, he's invaluable to me.'' I glanced over at my assistant, but he was lost in another world, something about pretty skunk girls in harem outfits. I growled and started banging my arm against the seat for emphasis. ``Are you fucking paying attention? This is fucking GOSPEL!'' He seemed confused. I then realized that, for a brief moment, I had forgotten that being an atheist, when I said ``Gospel'' I meant ``pure, unadulterated bullshit.'' Which was, of course, not what I intended to say just then. My story was, of course, much truer than the Bible. I knew this because I had been there.
Suddenly, the car began to swerve dangerously, and my assistant began grabbing at his own throat. ``Get off my neck, shit, you know I don't like collars, I'm a fucking bear for chrissakes!'' The car straightened out reasonably quickly, but Tobey looked as though he'd just shat bricks. Shat...Shatner? Is William Shatner's last name from the past-tense of someone who had Ners coming out of his ass?
Things were getting ugly-But why? I was puzzled, and not just because I couldn't figure out the Sudoku I'd been pounding away at on my DS for the past hour. Was there no communication in this car, in spite of all the fancy gadgets we'd had permanently implanted into our pockets and hands? Had we somehow missed out on the glorious information revolution?
My story WAS true, at least, I was pretty sure it was. Because it was true, I felt it was important to communicate its truthfulness to this slice of fresh meat, the big blob of venison in the back seat who was about to get inducted into our little cult. We had actually been sitting on the Terrace, in those ridiculous, uncomfortable chairs, drinking beer that tasted like the container it came in, about as alcoholic as a Mormon's urine.
tm, and he's going to hook me up with rooms and registration and cash and shit. He's even rented me a car, for some goddamn reason. He knows I hate driving.''
My assistant said nothing for awhile, then sighed and rubbed his forehead. ``Shit, sounds like a real bind. You're going to need lots of technical assistance before this is over, especially with that POS Crapaq laptop you cart around. My first bit of assistance is to tell you to pick up this car and get the hell out of here now, so we can drive all day Thursday. This blows the last of my vacation days, of course, since I will of course have to tag along. Oh and we'll need lots of furry porn, a hell of a lot more than you've got yourself.'' I blinked, and wondered if he'd seen the illustration Nauv had made of me long ago when he and I were still talking. The entire page was filled with moving boxes, all stuffed with porn, and was surprisingly close to reality.
``Well, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right, I guess. We'll need to pick up some equipment, like an Xbox or something, to keep us occupied when we're not on the con floor. A 360 of course, none of that old-fashioned huge-black-box shit. We're not flying, we don't need any black boxes.''
``Well, they're orange now anyway.''
``Orange Xboxes? Why?''
``Forget it. Why the fuck does he want you to go?''
``Same as always, he wants me to tell him all about it, buy him some porn, and ensure I get lots of fursuit photos. A friend of his named Laredo, some Brazilian guy with a camera, is going to be there for the photos, but I'm supposed to baby him and ensure he gets the best shots. You know how Ivan goes for furry girls with big knockers, and has an aversion to the male form.''
``Well, as your assistant, I advise you to get a goddamn camera anyway. How can you trust some Portugese-speaking foreigner to know to avoid beefy faggots when he probably is one himself? Fuck, we're all faggots, it's part of being a fur.''
``No way, I hate cameras. Besides, how could I get my hands on a Canon Optipix 9000 at this time of day?''
``Cannon Optipix? Shit, the hard part would be paying for it. Especially what with how little you earn curing AIDS and all. I thought there was supposed to be money in AIDS, that's the only reason they started researching it, cus it just kills fags and blacks.''
``Well it's a fantastic camera and I'm going to need it to capture those furry tits. You see, it has a unique flash system which allows you to get the perfect lighting in any light, and it's got 30 megapixel resolution.''
``Thirty mexapixel? Shit, Ivan'll be able to count the goddamn HAIRS on those tits.''
``Don't say such disgusting, horrible things. I just wanna do my duty, get the job done well, is all.''
``Duty dun fucked you in the ass, Roland.''
``Yeah well I like it up the pooper, so fuck you. I'll call Ivan back and get him to Paypal me some cash. I've got a Paypal credit card so I can just burn right through it as soon as it clears.''
Ivan had never heard of a Canon Optipix 9000 but he sure as hell wasn't paying for it, especially when he went to all that trouble to get Laredo and his equipment into the country. He did, however, send me $300 via Paypal once I suggested he do so, which would save us all the hassle of having to deal with a post-9/11 Western Union. Why the fuck did they think that a good little Aryan boy like me would be a terrorist? Sure I looked like Timothy McViegh, but last I checked we were after the towelheads now. Whitey can kill all the people he wants, so long as they're brown.
I decided I should convert this into cash, so I immediately went to Walgreens and bought about ten dollars worth of tussin, then asked for $290 cash back. The woman behind the counter, who was definitely big enough to be two women (or three if they were skinny Asian chicks) refused to give me more than $60 cash, claiming it was store policy, but I could smell bullshit and so I demanded to speak to the manager. The AC was out so by the time the manager came over and gave me my cash, I was soaking in sweat. I'm just not built for hot weather, and summers are a big drag for me. Winters would be fine, but every moron turns his heat up all the way, like he just can't WAIT for global warming to kill the lot of us. Fuckers need to learn to enjoy snow or move south, instead of raping Mother Earth.
I took my money and left. My assistant was waiting for me on the Library Mall. He shook his head as I whined about the trouble I'd gone through to turn numbers in a computer into little green slips of paper. ``You DO realize that $290 won't go far, right? We won't be able to make this without a credit card, preferably one that doesn't belong to either of us.''
I assured him we'd be able to get, or make, a credit card that belong to neither of us and would be valid and untraced for just long enough to rack up a gigantic bill over the weekend. ``You Canadians are all the same. You have no faith in the essential negligence of the American legal system. If it's not drugs, rape, murder, or anything else you can get on the evening news, nobody bothers to fuck with it. Shit, how much money you think Haliburton has stolen from me at this point? Those tax-dollars were supposed to go to building schoolhouses in Iraq, not fourteen-year-old prostitutes in Malaysia. That's why we've got to go on this crazy trip. To find the New Hope for America, when it comes spewing out of the vagina-asshole that is the Fur Fandom. We're the only persons who can do this, Ursa. We're the only people smart enough to see the Hope but too fucking stupid to leave the fandom!''
``You're right, Roland. We MUST do this thing.''
``Right. But first, we need to pick up the car. And we need lots of caffeine. And a laptop, because mine sucks. And something to let our iPods play over the stereo. And some furry shirts, but I think we already have those.'' The only way to pull this off, I thought, was to dress like our fellow retards and then dive right into the great vagina-asshole like Greg Louganis, only without the AIDS.
But what WAS the fandom we intended to immerse ourselves in? At this point we had no idea, other than that it involved cartoon animals and fucking. All we knew is that we, the amateurs, had to get up to our necks in this Iraq-like quagmire and demonstrate our ignorance and immaturity. It was pure blogosphere journalism.
There was also the society factor. Every now and then you get sick of your dead-end job, and the billions of dollars your boss is making off your hard work, and you need to get the fuck out of town until your desire for a communist revolution dies down. To ``relax'' by reminding yourself that you could be in much worse places than Madison, Wisconsin. Pittsburgh, PA for example.
Getting hold of the tussin, caffeine, and other ingestables had been surprisingly easy. Exam season had ended months ago, so supplies were up while demand was down. But picking up a car when you had to get around by bike, and to find an electronics store staffed by people who weren't at an Amish-level of technological understanding, was surprisingly difficult. My assistant dealt with the rental car agency, which seemed to be unwilling to believe that my ID did indeed certify I was 25 (they were right in their suspicion, I was 21) and ultimately agreed to let him take the car in his name instead, as he was 28. Why a 21 year old with a perfect driving record is less of a risk than a 28 year old with three DUIs I will never understand, but that's the law, I guess. They agreed to let him drive a small, cheap, fuel-efficient subcompact that could barely hold the both of us and all the shit we intended to bring along.
``Hang on to it, we'll come pick it up ourselves.'' I heard him shout into his cell phone. I don't believe all the shit about these phones having decent mics, every one I see, the guy has to yell in it, and is still always having to repeat himself at an even louder volume. ``We'll be over there in like an hour. Of course I have a fucking Mastercard, I told you that already!''
``Don't take any shit off those pigs!'' I murmured in encouragement. ``Wait, didn't Ivan say he was paying for the rental car?''
``They don't accept American Express, only Visa and Mastercard. So we'll just put it on the bum card and then leave them to deal with it. Ivan will appreciate the fact we're saving him money anyway. Now all we have to do is get a bum credit card. And it needs to be a MasterCard, because that's what I told them it was.''
After a bunch more calls and a few web searches, we finally found a bank that not only doled out on-the-spot Mastercards (for a fee, which we would of course put on that very same card) but which would no doubt not recognize us. We thought the latter was important, especially as we'd be flashing plenty of very good, but still very fake, ID. The last thing we wanted was for someone to try and be friendly and call us by our real names. We were Roland Duke and Ursa Lebowitz, and nobody else.
The bank was only a short distance away, but we found ourselves hamstrung by a massive, snarling accident that not only killed several partying teenagers (good) but managed to turn a fire hydrant into Old Faithful (bad), shut down the road (worse) and kill a lady's pet Doberman (worst). After plying our way through the mess, trying not to get in anyone's way, we made it to the bank, but found that they were trying to close up at 4:59, a full sixty seconds ahead of schedule. They insisted they were closed at first, but after I managed to get Ursa to fake a fit of crying they let us in and began rushing us through the application process. I'll never understand why, but when a 300+ pound human/walrus hybrid who thinks he's a bear starts crying, people do what he wants. Yet when a mostly-sane, handsome, 180 lb man who sometimes pretends he's a fox asks politely, people tell him to fuck off. Maybe I should cripple or mutilate myself for the sake of sympathy and attention. All those goddamn piercings other kids today have can't be for any other reason.
We were lucky to have arrived when we did, as they rushed us through without looking too closely at anything. Ursa made up some sob story about how we had some insurance payment due today, and how he had a raging case of diabetes, and how we needed unlimited credit to buy insulin or else he'd end up in jail without his meds. It was realistic sounding, especially when it was 5:10 and you really wanted to go home and close up. Somehow he managed to get two cards, one in each of our fake names, and he thanked everyone in the bank on the way out before reverting back to his true self.
``Motherfuckers don't even know what hit `em. Here we are, with MasterCards in all sorts of precious metals, assigned to names and addresses that don't exist. And fuck all if they'll bother checking these things until Monday. Lazy bank bastards will probably wait until we try to call them, or just try to call us, by dialing some random string of numbers I just came up with.''
``It's something to think about, isn't it? These days people are so untouched by trauma, they can't tell the real from the fake. They're totally paranoid until you play the victim, and then you can rape `em for all they're worth. Even Michael Jackson is in on the whole `victim' shtick.''
Now that we had the card, we had to go pick up the car, and again Ursa had to whip out his sob story just to let me sit in the driver's seat, complaining that his diabetes made him blind but that he would be responsible for the car and that I was a very good driver. That last part was true enough, for the most part, but as I tried to figure out the cramped, complicated ``cockpit'' of this thing I accidentally activated what I later found was some sort of computer-controlled parallel parking system. I was jerked around wildly, the onboard computer perplexed as to where it was supposed to parallel park in the middle of a large, empty, curb-free parking lot. Eventually either the computer got frustrated or I hit something to tell it to quit trying, but this was only after several massive starts and stops.
``Jesus Christ! You almost plowed into a light pole, twice. I've NEVER seen a car jerk like that. What the fuck did you DO?'' I was reluctant to admit that I hated this car and its technology already, and that they could take this ``auto-parking'' to hell for all I cared. So I did my job: I made up a good story.
``Oh I ALWAYS do that. You see one time I rented this car, well, my Dad rented it, and the suspension was so mushy and unresponsive...'' I could tell he wasn't buying it, so I decided to make it totally fantastical. I've found that the only way you can get someone to swallow a lie is to make it so completely unbelievable that they presume you couldn't possibly make it up. I know this, and now that you know I know this, you should take everything I say with a grain of salt. But no more, because it's bad for your heart.
``Well see the wheels started to dig into the wheel wells on the turn. And we made this sharp, rough turn this one time...Drove the wheel right up into the goddamn well and popped the motherfucker. We rolled and only by the grace of God did we manage to not get our necks snapped.'' I knew it had worked when the attendant simply nodded and backed off. During this entire discussion, my assistant had been loading up the car, and by now it was filled with cases of over-the-counter and proscription drugs, all of which we'd been rounding up the entire afternoon. He raised an eyebrow at this. I would have too had I not been used to it, and thus known that not only were these drugs legal, but necessary. Out of the psychedelic age, American finally came to realize it's too stupid and crazy to do anything without popping pills for it first.
``You guys aren't on any sort of sleep-inducing medication, are you?'' he asked. He handed me his pen and a clipboard, and I waved the pen around wildly on the paper, only approximating a signature.
``Not me. I'm a healthy, responsible individual.'' I was worried he might not swallow this lie, because at any other time than tonight it would have been the truth. But I guess my first, big one had prepped him for the later, smaller ones and he seemed to trust me now. Were he a nicer guy, I'd have felt sorry for him. As we took off I realized I still held his pen in my teeth, but after realizing how cheap and utilitarian it was I decided to keep it. Spartan virtues, that's me. Nothing expensive, gaudy or flashy, I just want it to work. Only way to survive in this materialism nightmare of a culture.
We spent the rest of the evening swimming in the lake and chucking whatever else we could fit into the car. It was mostly porn, and as always, we managed to fit an amazingly large amount of it in there. Around three AM we decided to get going in order to beat the traffic, and because it was just a long fucking way around the Great Lakes all the way to Pittsburgh. We went through Java Detour with the intent of getting coffee and breakfast, but apparently we didn't arrive during any one of the twenty-four hours of the day they were open. Funny, I thought there were only 24. Had an extra one been added when I wasn't looking? Surely not. The GOP might be able to hide things like prisoners, rape, torture, abuse, and the sale of the entire USA via eBay, but I was certain people would notice an extra hour in the day, and then tell me about it. It would muck up the TV schedules, for chrissakes!
At this time my mind drifted back to the fact that Tobey had cared to mention we were riding in a hybrid vehicle. Why would that matter? The only reason we had a hybrid was that we had been given one. After all, a few hybrid vehicles weren't going to save the planet at this point. We were all riding around the sun on one gigantic fucked dirt ball, praying to a nonexistent YWH to do all the hard work and accept all the blame. If God did exist, I was sure that he'd let us roast in our own stew at this point. Probably as fed up with the world's bullshit as I am, at least.
Part of me was tempted to pry further. Was he some liberal, tree-humping pseudo hippie, who gave money to the Red Cross to assuage his white-man's guilt? Or worse, did he think we were people like that? I was tempted to grab this young buck by the eyeballs and start forcing him to look at the grim meathook realities of life that I, though not much older than him, had very much realized. I wanted to take him to Africa and show him how his Red Cross money was being squandered, and how the real problem was Islam and Christianity and Tradition. People don't need money, they need stability and order and safety so they can make their own goddamn money. And the world doesn't need saving, it was here before we arrived and it will still be here after we exterminate ourselves. Fuck, for all we know, the dinosaurs died out because they all drove pimped out SUVs while talking on their cell phones. Now that we've given Reptiles and Mammals a chance, it's time for us to kill ourselves so Birds can have a go at it. It's only fair.
This rambling and disjointedness wasn't helping our case, though. It was irrelevant. I needed to eliminate irrelevancies and get my train of thought back on the right track. Luckily there was a pill for that. I opened the glove compartment and took out two tabs of Ritalin, then put them in my mouth and chased them down with Jolt. Not exactly the manufacturer's intended use, but fuck the manufacturer.
Nothing kills creativity or originality faster than a nice big hit of Ritalin. That's why they give it out to kids like Halloween candy. Focus. Study. Ignore your dreams, your wants, your desires, and get ready to spend your life in a little cubicle slaving away for the same goddamn bastard who's feeding you these things. Ritalin and Adderall and all the other shit they give to ADHD kids has killed more brilliant minds than Hitler. If they'd handed this out in the sixties, we could have stopped the acid wave before it even happened. It makes kids so easy to manage you can just drop the fuckers in front of Murder News and leave `em till they're good and desensitized and ready to be kicked out of the house. Ritalin is the complacency drug, the one that puts Reality's mask back on. And I sorely needed to see that shining faux face about now.
``You see, we're making this trip to find out about the New Hope for America.'' I said. I knew the pills were working because my voice had changed, and I had stopped cursing. ``We're going to be taking advantage of everything this country has to offer on our little voyage. We're going to find out about the fantastic opportunities only true Americans like us can ever hope to exploit.''
My assistant understood this concept, despite his national handicap, but Tobey appeared to not be as easy to reach. Fucking prey species, thick as a plank most of the time. He told me he understood what I was talking about, but in my newly ``grounded'' state I could tell he was lying.
All of a sudden, I felt the car veer onto the gravel shoulder and come to a shuddering halt. Bottles of assorted things somehow managed to pack themselves in tighter by falling. I presumed at this point that we'd packed everything so tight it couldn't move, but somehow some bottles managed to break themselves. My assistant was hunched over the wheel, his eyes peeled wide and staring intently at something directly in his line of sight. In my mind, the tussin and Ritalin must have been duking it out, because in a flash of insanity I screamed ``We can't stop here! This is shithawk country!''
``There's a squirrel on the road,'' he said. ``I'm not going to hit a poor little squirrel.'' Normally, I'd begin preaching about natural selection about now, but we were in danger of being late as it was I decided to actually look. There was no squirrel, of course. He had imagined, or hallucinated, the whole thing, or else squished the fella back when he first hit his breaks. I turned to Tobey and smiled as disarmingly as I could.
``You'll have to excuse my friend, he has a mental disease. Vagina clitoris, I think it's called. Anyways sometimes it makes him see things. But don't worry, I keep his medication on hand at all times.'' I pulled out two more Ritalin tablets and had him down them. They began to kick in fast, and soon he was turning into the Stepford wife I needed him to be. Who would have thought that antlike conformity could come in a pill?
Of course, not even a pill can knock out everything, and in my own experience, I knew that mixing Ritalin and cough syrup was not entirely safe. Underneath your thin veneer of sanity the other drugs you've taken keep lurking, waiting for a moment to strike out and break through your plastic Barbie smile. At least they're most likely to appear in those first few minutes, when the legions of Ritalin shock troops are still putting down those awful Reality insurgents.
One hit him almost immediately, sending his arm lashing out at the stereo to fiddle with the volume and preamp. ``Turn this shit UP man, I need to feel the bass all the way down in my fucking BALLS, man.'' I tried to drown him out with my own headphones, but soon gave in, attacking his hand with my own. As I managed to achieve silence, I could see things in his mind begin to snap. It's like a newly frozen lake in a powerful wind, what seems solid suddenly turns into a raging liquid with a lot of crashing and breaking. All you can do is stand back and wait for the wind to die down and the lake to refreeze.
``Why...Why has the car stopped? Is it broken? Call triple-A. Somebody, call fucking triple-A!'' He began to bounce around violently in the car, slamming the horn and shouting. And then, suddenly, without warning, his face went blank, and he calmed right down. I knew the Ritalin had, at least in the short term, won out. That big plastic smile appeared, and then, Ursa began to speak.
``The truth is that we're going to this con to find a guy named Savage Werewolf. We've know him for years, but he pirated our art and you know what that means, right?'' My eyes went wide with bewilderment. Something must be reacting with the Ritalin. How could his face and demeanor be so frighteningly normal, when he was yammering about some poor fur I'd never heard of? ``It means that Savage Werewolf has cashed his check...And I'm gonna chop his balls off, and eat them...'' Some part of my tortured mind decided now was a good time to agree.
``That's right. What is this country coming to, when a FOREIGNER like that can get away with stealing from a nationally published novelist?'' I took a big chomp on the pen in my mouth and tried to look as non-threatening to our passenger as possible. I failed miserably. ``Don't worry, though. We know what he looks like IRL, and you're nothing like him. You're SAFE.''
Tobey wasn't taking any chances, though. Without warning he flung his door open and leapt out of the car, grabbing his bags and yanking them out as he went. I think we had some of our own stuff fall out, since it failed to show up later, but there are more important things than stuff. ``Don't worry about me, guys!'' he said. ``I needed to get off here anyway! Y'all have a good time at the con!''
``Wait!'' I said. ``Come back, have a few colas with us!'' but I doubt he heard me. Ursa had turned the music all the way back up, and Tobey was headed out at quite a clip. My assistant just laughed, and put the petal to the floor, the sudden burst of acceleration shutting the door as well as breaking something or other in the back seat.
``Jesus Christ, what a loser. That asshole made me nervous. I mean here we are, giving him a very nice, very free ride to a con, and he ditches us as soon as he gets a chance. It's no wonder his friends left him on the side of the road.'' Now that we were underway, I checked my watch, so that I could complain about how late we were gonna be.
``Shit, it's almost three, and we've got a long way to go. Pull over, it's my turn to drive.'' Another quick stop and a short Chinese fire drill and we were underway again, only with me driving, at top speed, in the fast lane. My dad always complains that modern cars are handicapped by modern fuel and emissions restrictions, but I never remember him doing 110 in a shitty rental vehicle while carrying 300 lbs of blubber and twice that in supplies. Modern cars may be tiny and cramped, but they are not slow.
``It's absolutely imperative that we get to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center before four. Otherwise we might have to do the unthinkable: bum a room from someone.'' My assistant nodded in agreement.
``Fine, but forget that bullshit about the New Hope for America. The important thing is how much porn I can get through customs when I go back to Toronto.''
``Shit, don't worry about that, you know as well as I do that only American customs worries about porn. All the Canadians want is for you not to kill anyone or use any drugs not produced domestically. Gotta support those Newfies and their pot farms, after all.'' My assistant wasn't listening. Instead, he was attempting to open and consume four packets of Dip Stix simultaneously. It was not going well, and he ended up spilling all that multicolored sugar on himself and the upholstery.
``Shit, look what JESUS did to me!'' He attempted to stick his middle finger out the window, not noticing that it wasn't rolled down. ``Fuck you God! Look what you've done now!'' I growled and did my best to avoid swerving while chewing him out.
``There is no God and you did that all to yourself! You're on the fucking Con Security again this year, aren't you? And you're only coming with me to see that I don't run around the Art Show snorting caffeine powder up my nose!'' He just laughed and then, out of nowhere, pulled out a surprisingly massive Nerf gun. He waved it around in my face, but I wasn't overly concerned. I needed to focus on driving.
``Plenty of coyotes, even up here. You keep talking shit like that and I'll see that you're fed to `em, you bastard...'' I could see in his eyes that the man I knew wasn't in right now, and thus, I was safe. Ursa new my ways, my habits, my weaknesses. But whatever this thing was, it was totally ignorant. He just stared at me and smiled, thinking he was in charge, that he was dominant. Not outside of the bedroom, he isn't.
``You're going to check into a hotel gonked out on drugs, using your furry name, and charging it all to a guy you've never met in person. Are you even READY to be this stupid?'' he asked. I paid no attention. Instead, I checked my watch.
``Shit, under an hour left, I've got to GO.'' This statement was, of course, ridiculous. I was already going, and at top speed, and there was no logical reason as to why I hadn't been pulled over by the cops yet. The only thing that slowed me down was gridlock, but somehow, I made it through, and could clearly see the dozens of bridges leaping out at me, especially the big yellow one I intended to cross. Somehow I managed to make it to the hotel without incident, and I even had about five minutes to spare. I walked up to the front desk, amazed at the lack of a line, and ignoring he herd of fellow freaks milling about the lobby.
Then it all went wrong. Maybe I got scared. Maybe I got nervous. Maybe the drugs had caused a disconnect between several regions of my brain. ``Good...EVENING! My name is...Roland Duke...And I know I have a reservation here, my friend set it up...Free food, open...faced sandwiches, Fair and Balanced reporting...Oh and I realize that my friend's name is not on the list, but I must insist he be added and given a room key!''
The woman looked at me, as though she knew something was very wrong, yet she was completely capable of handling it. This is the most uncomfortable position you can be when you've been mixing and matching proscription drugs all day: that the person in front of you knows what you've done, and that only half the things you can see right now are actually there.
``You're at the wrong table, Roland. But I do have your badge here...'' she handed me a small piece of plastic, which I clutched desperately, and then checked my name off on a list. ``Oh and someone who calls himself Laredo told me to tell you to talk to him when you got yourself registered. You should go to the front desk and get your room set up and ask about him.'' Her voice was calm and commanding, like an old schoolmarm, or other sort of benevolent-but-aggressive female authority figure.
Suddenly a big fat hand grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. ``Quit bothering Kage's mom. I checked us in, here's your key.'' He pushed another little piece of plastic into my hand, then began dragging me towards the elevators. At that moment, I realized that the entire world was ruled by little plastic cards, and that somewhere in Nevada was one giant, plastic card, the plastic card queen, who had orchestrated both the 2000 election and 9/11, and kept King George in power for a full six years. Or was it five? After all, he didn't officially start until 2001...
``They told us not to go into the room yet because they're still cleaning it. Apparently some furs had a wild party in it last night, then were all kicked out. They told us to wait in the bar, and that we could order anything we wanted, provided it didn't total up to more than $20.''
Next I remember I was sitting on a bar stool drinking a gin-and-tonic, though I can't tell you why. I hate gin-and-tonics. In fact, I'm really not much for drinking, as alcohol is bitter, whereas my normal pollutants are candy flavored. Who needs booze when you can just guzzle some mint-flavored mouthwash?
``I talked to Laredo, he's waiting for us with some other Brazilians on the twelfth floor. He seemed like a nice guy, and he had like a billion cameras. He's a bird, by the way. A cockatoo, believe it or not.''
``Laredo...Who's Laredo?'' I was always bad with names, especially when I was exhausted, medicated, and drunk. I doubt I was that last one, since it takes a surprisingly large amount of alcohol to get me wasted. I don't understand why. I looked around, watching a wolf sink his teeth into some bunny who apparently enjoyed the experience. ``We need fursuits, so we can sneak out of this zoo unnoticed. The animals are everywhere, and someone is giving BOOZE to these monstrosities.''
``We're at a goddamn furcon, Roland. Of course there are animals drinking booze. Anyways Laredo said he's your photographer and that he knows you, but I don't believe him. I could see it into his eyes. He's working for Savage Werewolf, and he's scared shitless, now that we know what's up.'' I looked down at the floor, then recoiled at the thick, rich redness of it all. Only one thing was that red.
``Holy fuck, look at all the blood on the floor! How many people have been killed already? We need to get OUT of here!'' My head turned until it saw a flock of paper eyes, sheathed in artificial fur, all staring right at me with cartoon-like intensity. ``Shit, they've spotted us, we've got to make a run for it!''
Somehow we ended up in our room, and within moments my assistant was on the phone for room service. I wanted to discourage him at first, by reminding him that in this modern era extortion was a mandatory business practice, but then I remembered that Ivan would be picking up the tab. Ivan...Where did he get all this money? Was he smuggling AKs into the country from former Soviet satellites? Was he with the Russian mob? Was he in any way a man bad enough to allow us to suffer consequences for our actions? Would he have us executed for ordering up so much food? Would he suspect we were potheads who had the munchies? Of course we weren't. We were good, red-blooded Americans (well, I was) who never touched illegal substances! We got high enough off of our proscriptions, thank you very much.
The food came up rather promptly, and though the service waiter was quite hairy he was definitely not wearing a goddamn fursuit. He spoke no English and refused a tip even when Ursa tried to force it on him, so I knew he wasn't Mexican. Must be from the middle east somewhere, some place where they knew better than to accept blood money from fat Anglos. We both dug into the food, and although I wasn't hungry, I managed to pack away a good amount of pizza, and several of the tangerines that had somehow been included in our order. Did we pay for these things, or were they just trying to get rid of them? I stashed several on my person anyway, figuring they might come in handy later. Adventure games have taught me that you should always pick up anything out of the ordinary, you'll need it to solve a puzzle in a later level and you can't always go back without restarting.
``There are some Explosions in the Sky.'' I said, looking out the window.
``Well why don't you shut the drapes or put some headphones on, or something, if it bothers you?'' At this point I wasn't sure if I was talking about an acoustic band or the fireworks outside my window, but I knew that whatever I had to say was very important.
``Not yet, I need to capture video footage of it all. To sell to Michael Moore, or at least put up on YouTube.'' My assistant wasn't buying it, and he went over and closed the drapes, then turned on the TV, presumably to help drown out whatever voices I might be hearing. I thought he knew me better than that, the voices in my head cut through TV like a katana though exposed neck.
``You need to stop all this crazy talk and wake up and realize where you are, and that what you're seeing is very real but also not dangerous. Jesus, you almost went crazy down there. You were waving around this Wiimote like you wanted to cut someone. They'll probably never let us back into the bar, they thought that you were some kind of nutty drunk.''
``What do you mean?''
``I mean that I left you alone for five fucking minutes, and when I come back you're trying to assault someone with a fifty dollar piece of plastic. Where the hell did you GET that thing? You're lucky they didn't call the cops or throw us out.'' I looked down and realized that I did indeed have a Wiimote in my hand, the wrist strap cinched tightly around my wrist, cutting off the circulation. The numerous kinky sexual applications for this toy immediately came to mind.
``Never mind that. Let us watch Fox News and enjoy this delicious cheesy bounty that Ivan has provided for us. Then we must find out what happened to the car...'' My assistant blinked his eyes as he realized we had left it, along with most of our stuff, out by the curb. Had it been stolen? Were we to go the entire con in only what we had on now? Fuck, we'd be out of caffeine by noon tomorrow. Sooner if we wanted to be coherent tonight.
My assistant called the front desk, and within ten minutes all of our luggage, drugs, and even a few things we didn't know we had were brought to our door by a squad of buzz-cut Ukranians. The Ukranians are a good people, what with universal conscription and all. Teaches them to stand up straight, keep in shape, and shoot towel-heads. And they only get drunk when off duty, or when the duty is stupid. Safety checks on a nuclear plant, for instance.
We chewed our way though candy while playing the DS and letting Homer Simpson do the talking. It was late and we intended to forgo the few hours of sleep we might have available to us in favor of a few more steps closer to the brink of madness. Eventually the morning news appeared, and it instantly sent my Canadian friend into a blind rage.
``Jesus fucking Christ, what is WRONG with you Americans? Can't you tell that this is all bullshit? Iraq is a fucking civil war, you fuckheads, and even if you kill Saddam nothing will change!'' He angrily turned off the TV before the right wing noise machine could get any louder. We put on our badges and proceeded to the elevators, even though nothing would be happening until at least ten o'clock. It was odd, but for some reason we were the only people in the elevator. I glanced over at my assistant and looked at his badge.
``Since when are you Dr. Friday?'' I asked.
``Since I needed to sneak up on Savage Werewolf. If he doesn't know what I look like, I can get right up in that scrawny little face of his and show him who's boss.'' I pondered what a strange world it must be, where a quick name change can allow you to get away with anything. In this day and age of constant identity theft, nobody even knows who they are anymore.
I put on my headphones and strode confidently through the hallways, the words and doings of those around me blocked out by The Pillows incoherent screaming. I had been told that, even if I did speak Japanese, their lyrics made no sense whatsoever. Much like the mumblings of those around me. Even though I spoke English, I could never hope to understand what the fuck these geeks were talking about. Something involving a cartoon or a comic book maybe? I didn't have enough of the backstory. But I knew it had to be dumb, and campy, or else I'd already be into it, wouldn't I?
As I wondered around I heard the distinct sound of screams, at top volume and close by. At first I wanted to panic, half expecting there to be some sort of shooting, but when I noticed no one around me was panicking I calmed down a bit. I was in the actual convention center and there was a large gaggle of furs in front of the doors, all talking and yammering to one another about whatever was on their minds. Was I really smarter than all these people? Surely not, fuck, I was one of them!
The agonized screams came from behind me again, and I turned to see a small group of furs, huddled up in what looked like a drum circle, with a laptop sitting across each one of their knees. A World of Warcraft guild, right here in the fucking con, using up the local wireless! They weren't going to let any event, no matter how big, no matter how much money they'd already squandered to let them attend, interfere with their leveling up. Were I any more of a man I'd have felt sorry for them. As it was, I just wanted to kick their heads in and blame WoW for having killed a good relationship I had going back in 05. WoW eats men, and women, and bank accounts, alive. Normal men will never understand my fear and hatred of MMORPGs, but that is my reasoning.
The screams of dying enemies and the cheap sound effects of magic being cast added a perverse rhythm to this crazy thing. They cut into the yelling and talking and yammering about this and that. I muscled my way to the gates and started chatting up one of the con security staff. I always do this, they're less suspicious of anyone who bothers to get his face and name known to them and is polite and respectful of their authority. You'd have to be crazy to commit sins against the fandom when they know your face.
Lucky for me, I am crazy. Totally wacked, in fact. We smiled and chatted about some trifling things he cared about but which I only pretended to know of. I imagine we all do that at these great get-togethers, these temporary colonies for social lepers. The newly-christened Dr. Friday showed up soon after, and began to chat with the guard, apparently full-knowing whatever the hell ``Tall Tails'' was. The way Dr. Friday talked about it, it actually sounded interesting, and I was quite tempted to check it out as soon as I had a chance. Fuck, I might even pay for it, if it was this good.
We still had an entire hour to kill before things opened up, and yet, and I didn't want to spoil my inevitable interest in ``Tall Tails'' by hearing all the sordid details, so I wandered around for a bit, looking for someone I could unleash my big mouth on. I'm a bit of a ``serial talker'' in that, once started, the only way to shut me up is a violent blow to the head or a good dosage of oral sex. And I pretty much never get the latter.
A big guy (and by that I mean fat) suddenly appeared in front of me, his Harley-Davidson T-shirt stretched to its limits by his intense man-boobs. I will never understand why we do not make bras for fat guys, since at the very least, it would help cover up some of the immense rolls of fat that come charging at you the moment you look in their direction. He needed someone to talk to, and from the looks of it, all I could hope to do was chomp my pen and wait for this tidal wave to end.
ckpack, with a ``Vixens from Outer Space'' T-shirt on, waiting in line for the doors? ``Man I can't wait for this! I've been up all night, I just LOVE Anthrocontm! My mate, he was all `we can't afford to go this year' and I was all `well can I just go?' and then five hours driving later here I am, about to buy some PORN!'' No one wanted to argue with him, or point out that he was probably in the worst homosexual relationship of all time, something that was entirely his own fault. When someone moved between us I took my cue and vanished into the crowd, something I had always been excellent at doing.
Behind me, a pair of geeks in full ren-faire costume were sitting together. The male one was yelling into his cell phone, while the female was trying to keep their cheap costumes on their bodies, the things disintegrating before my very eyes. ``This is a magic moment in the fandom's history, I'm telling ya! I was at MFF and it was nothing like this at all, this is WAY better than anything I've ever seen, or considered seeing!'' The female began working and fidgeting with his belt.
``Stand UP dammit, this outfit isn't meant to be worn while sitting, and your belt is in danger of popping right off your gut.'' He just laughed.
``Listen, it's too EARLY for me to stand up. I'm too SEXY to stand up just yet! You don't want me giving these fine young ladies wet panties before they even get to stroll though the GOOD part of the art show, do you?''
I backed off. I was too mature for this shit. I HAD to be. The horrible nightmare of high school had ended long ago in a bloody conflict and some time in a mental institution after my internet-girlfriend dumped me for some lardass in Atlanta. I was a published, almost respectable author at this point. I was the man who could shit out a five-page spoogefest in under an hour, when motivation and inspiration collided. Please tell me I'm at least marginally better than THESE poor fuckers!
Without warning the doors were flung open, and a giant cry of ``INCOMING!'' came from inside. There was a mad rush as the entire con seemed to charge forward into the big hall all at once. Several thousand people all tried to push and shove their way through five gigantic doors, as if they were attempting to escape some fire hell-bent on gobbling up their fat and bloated bodies. I was tempted to run with the herd, to join the stampede, but us foxes have learned from long experience to run AWAY from such phenomena, not into it. That is why, in spite if being rape-bait, we have managed to survive and even thrive in this crazy diversity. I instead made a bee-line for the now barren men's room, to take a few things from my backpack and ensure my mind would be able to catch up with reality.
It would be simple. Caffeine and Sudafed to keep me awake (the latter is, of course, the first step in making meth), sugar for energy, and an entire bottle of the tussin to ensure I'd be able to see and understand what was around me. The tussin would also help me feel better about what was going on, as I have found that on the tussin even seeing my dead grandfather come at me with an assault rifle cannot phase me. If only I'd been able to get my hands on some Valium. Oh well, spilt milk.
I picked out a stall and ingested the chemicals in a manic rush, chugging and shoving them down my throat with no desire to see how much was going in, or what the hell I looked like with red goop and sugar crystals pasted onto my face. With luck, someone would think it was part of some crazed sugar-eating zombie costume. I would have gone out in that horrible state of appearance had not my hand washing compulsion kicked in. Soon I found myself washing my hands, arms, face...Every bit of exposed skin on my person, actually. When I was done, I looked at myself in the mirror. A strange, but clean, person stared back, his pupils dilating unevenly to lights only he could see. A trifle strange, perhaps. But definitely not crazy.
I slowly proceeded to the doors, presented my badge and told the guards to fuck off, and then began to wander inside. The drugs were wreaking havoc on my body, and I thought I might throw up. I decided that before I threw up, I must have some water, so I headed to the nearest cooler and began to fill and down a cheap plastic cup over and over. I had no idea I was so thirsty. Must be all the caffeine and sugar. It causes dehydration, you know.
All of a sudden I was surrounded by a flock of birds, each one another strange, almost unnatural set of colors. One of them extended a wing in my direction and identified himself as ``Laredo.'' Shit, what was in this goop? Had I somehow managed to see what these people pretended to look like, instead of what they were? And if I had, how come every last one of the bastards seemed to be completely colorblind?
``Roland, good to see you! I ahh have been taking lots of photos for Ivan. He told me you know where to go for best pictures and shots and so on, yes?'' The poor bastard was being incredibly friendly with me. I knew to feel sorry for this lunk, he still had a shred or two of innocence left, and I was no doubt going to break it in my manic, drug-induced frenzy. Might as well get it over with.
The crowd was immense. Clearly there was more people at this con than anyone could have been capable of anticipating. Thousands of these porn-grabbing, fantasy-world humping monsters occupied every square inch of space, constantly rubbing and bumping into you and one another. I imagine this is what it must be like to be a water molecule swimming through a sea of polypeptides. Constantly bumping and pushing around, occupying any space big enough for you to fit into but too small for the giant blobs around you.
The idea of taking photographs here in any traditional sense was madness, and in my drug-addled state, direction and orientation was also a big problem. I could hear Laredo clicking away (had I slipped a Ritalin into that drug cocktail? Something to allow me to laser-like focus on a distant sound?) but I imagined he was getting photographs of little more than chests and torsos. Or maybe he was flying over my head, taking pictures from up there in the air? I sure as hell didn't know.
All of a sudden, we found ourselves in a clearing, and what looked like for monstrous bears wielding firearms blocked our path. No wonder the herd had scattered. I, though, was trapped. They'd spotted me. My only chance was to use that silver tongue all us foxes are given to talk our way out of trouble. Or give head, whatever happened to work.
``Who the hell are you guys with?'' one of them said. ``Don't you know we can't allow cameras in the art show?'' Fuck, here I am with a backpack full of dangerous drugs, and they're worried that Laredo might put a few snapshots of some artwork up on the internet?
I checked out these bears before speaking. They were coated in ominous symbols: eagles, flags, an assortment of red-white-blue things all attacking brown people...I needed to pick my words carefully. Thankfully Laredo had white skin, or else I would have been fucked. ``Oh don't mind us, we're just good American Dittoheads like yourselves, out to take a few snapshots of some fursuits. We have nothing to do with art piracy at all, no sir.'' I winced as I said that last bit. Everyone had scanned something for a friend, or downloaded illegal material at this point. Saying you were wholly without guilt was an out and out lie. You needed to admit your guilt in small, strategic amounts, to make sure people knew you were human but not dangerous or anything.
``Well if you want that, you should head up to the Headless Lounge up on the second floor. When they come out after their break, those fursuiters are always ready to pose for photos. Might wanna talk to those guys in the photography room while you're at it too!''
At this point I knew I needed to ditch Laredo, if not for my sake than for his. The last thing I needed was for this poor bastard to end up in trouble thanks to my own incompetence. I pointed him in the right direction and then let him go, hoping that at least some part of him was a carrier pidgeon, so that he might find his way home and, possibly, get Ivan those photos he was tossing out a fool's fortune to get.
At this point, things began to get very hazy, and I can only piece together what happened from the various bits of evidence and hearsay I was able to acquire after the fact. It was like Phoenix Wright, times a hundred, only it was real. And no one got killed, thank God.
At some point, Dr. Friday caught up with me. I had squandered a considerable sum on pornography in some sort of hormone-induced binge, and my bag was filled to the point of bursting with magazines, portfolios, and a sketchbook I'd never seen before, filled with art of some vixen I was sure I'd concocted in a slurred stupor. She was very hot, at least. Nice big tits, and from the look of these sketches, not a lot of moral fiber. Quite handy, since nothing gets a dick out of an ass faster than a big dose of moral fiber. That shit cleans out the colon, you see.
Dr. Friday seemed very insistent that we go check out a show by some shock-jock with a number for a name. Three, or something. The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, but after eighteen straight years of school (I started out young and was never permitted to take summers off) every number seems very familiar to you. Only acid freaks and war veterans are more successfully haunted by their past.
``Why the hell am I going out to see this washed-up ex-minister insult me and pretend that his dick is bigger than mine?'' I asked Dr. Friday as we moved ourselves towards the doors.
``Look, you said you were here to snatch the New Hope for America out of the vagina-asshole that is the fur-fandom, right? Well this asshole-mouthed washup is practically the voice of the fandom. Are you here to have fun, or are you here to find what you came to get?''
``To get what's coming to me, of course!'' I said. We strode up to the auditorium doors, only to find them closed, and guarded by a pair of mean-looking volunteers dressed up in British Imperial Red.
``'Scuse me, sir, you can't go in, the show's already started.'' The one who spoke moved out to stop us, his hand outstretched like those two statuses in Fellowship of the Ring. He had a determined look on his face that let us know his two-incher was getting a nice fat chubby at the thought of making US have to do what HE said. Well fuck you, you're not even a goddamn rent-a-cop, and we PAID for this con (well, Ivan paid for us) instead of chickening out and working security just for the right to be here.
``Aww c'mon, we're big friends of 2.'' said Dr. Friday. So that was this bastard's name. I remembered instantly that he had wronged me in the past, somehow. It was something trifling and unimportant, I was sure of that, but right now I felt COMPELLED to be offended by whatever the fuck it was. ``We used to drink with him.''
For a moment I thought that the guards wouldn't buy it, but reluctantly he let us in, under the condition that we would stand quietly in the back, and not tell anyone. We were, of course, violating fire code by doing this, as the auditorium was completely packed. Damn, how did some guy with the word ``rant'' in his name get to be this popular? Clearly I was in the wrong field.
We were in there for no more than five minutes before being tossed out again. I was never entirely clear as to why, only that the pair of us, laughing like hyenas, were lying face down on the carpeting. I can only presume that we had started heckling, and I am still curious as to what I might have said. Was I funny? Had I upstaged the comic? Or had I just tossed around racial slurs like Kramer until someone decided to get rid of me?
``Damn you 2, some day I'll bring your whole fucking website down, you bastard!'' It was my assistant. I tried to think, at this point. This man must have been very important to me for some tract of time for me to have such passionate feelings, good or ill, about him. When had that happened, and why? I had no idea, but in any event it was time for us to get moving. There was a lot more con to explore, and the drugs would not wear off for a good time yet.
The art show and con floor had closed, but the game room and a number of various talks, events and shows were still going on. It was time for more tussin, so I cracked open a bottle and both me and my assistant took a big, mean chug. The sickly sweet reek of this foul liquid was overwhelming, but we both knew we needed it badly. We did, after all, have terrible coughs, or at least we would if we did not take our medicine.
Robitussin is an amazing miracle of modern medication. Small dosages have little to no effect, but larger dosages induce a deep, full-body relaxed feeling, allowing you to remain mellow and uninvolved in even the most ridiculous situations. Once you up the dosage further, it begins to gently massage your brain, until you're hallucinating nicely. The only downside is that you feel an overwhelming desire to sleep, but that was something me and my assistant had long since learned to fight off. Your body will tell you to sleep whenever it feels necessary, but you can always say no, and caffeine is always willing to help you say no.
The problem is that the more you say no, the less control your body can give you. Your brain never really sleeps, it's always doing something. However, I had been awake for forty-eight hours at this point, and the connection between mind and body was beginning to erode to nothing.
I approached the door, knowing I must present my badge, then walk in slowly. But in this state, everything went wrong. My feet no longer fell in a nice, steady order, and I felt myself begin to fall, then grab onto something hairy in a desperate attempt for balance. I was shoved by something else, possibly human, I never got a good look at it to be sure. My mind must have been thinking, but at this point it had been completely severed from my spinal column, as even my mouth was incapable of following orders. ``Sausage meat...Leftists...Jews did 9/11, so Mel Gibson says...Scientology will kill us all...'' What the fuck was I talking about? This made about as much sense as an internet forum.
The drug, in combination with exhaustion and intense overstimulation, had become a full-body experience. I suspect I had neglected to eat as well, which only meant that my starving corpse had saved a few bucks and upped the power of the drugs by a full octave. Exhaustion is the ultimate high for a fur-con: they expect you to be tired, so they don't suspect anything, and will even treat you with special care, rather than let you suffer the consequences of your stupidity. Someone put me through the door and shoved me inside, probably thinking he was doing me a favor.
I instantly realized I had not, as intended, gone to the game room. Instead I found myself in what must have been the fursuit dance, which, in retrospect, means I'd lost an hour or two in there somewhere. After all, didn't 2 give his little spiel in the same room the dance was to be held? No matter, I was in here now, being bombarded from all directions by flashing light, music turned up too loud to be distinguishable, and the absolute madness of people wearing gigantic furry suits.
It's impossible to call the motions going on in there dancing. Not to say the people in those suits had no sense of rhythm nor that they were uncoordinated: I've never been in one of those suits, but I am quite sure that one's vision and mobility are severely impaired. I'm just saying that such imparities, along with the noise, strobelight-induced blindness, and intense heat made anything approaching true dancing an impossibility.
But the madness doesn't stop, not until the music does, anyway, and no one seems to notice too closely what's going on. Here a gigantic winged thing, presumably some sort of mythical bird, slowly moves around its feathers in nothing approaching the beat of the music, while elsewhere two wolves appear to be dry humping some rabbit who acts as though nothing is happening. Even with mind-altering substances it is hard to comprehend, and impossible to enjoy, unless you are one of the revelers. I, of course, had better things to spend my money on than a fursuit (drugs, pornography) so I was eventually driven out, though this time by my own fear rather than security. Nice to know that the feelings still kick in when death is near, I was beginning to think my sense of self preservation had taken a holiday.
As I was walking by the various small rooms in the main hotel used to host smaller, more mundane activities (mostly small talks of four to five people discussing in person what they had already discussed thoroughly over the internet) someone grabbed my shoulder and began to hustle me inside, talking about the ``Con DVD.''
``Say whatever you want, do whatever you want for the camera! We just need more footage of people having a good time. Just remember that everyone will hear ya, we're streaming this stuff LIVE to a big screen wheeled out into the lobby!''
The thought of someone in my state being able to blurt out whatever nerdy, drug-induced slur came to his mouth such that it would be broadcast to a big TV in plain sight was disturbing enough. But that this moment of madness would be captured eternally on video was just too much. What was this, TRL? Was I to be some sort of insane fan, requesting some video I'd already seen a billion times, so that other people who'd also seen it a billion times could cheer along with me? I had no idea that Big Brother would have commercial interruptions, though I had always suspected we would charge forward into such dumbassery. Mankind is the only species smart enough to cause its own extinction.
When you have been awake and drugged for a very long time, you will inevitably strike a moment when your mind and body revolt against your soul, questioning you on every level and doing all they can to FORCE you to sleep and sober. You think you're fine for hours, days even, but when you least expect it, nature comes up and grabs you by the balls and demands you trade in the sense of power and control you get from being a human in favor of the rest and relaxation of an animal. Thanks to Murphy's Law, it was bound to strike at exactly the wrong moment, which for us happened to be when we were in an impromptu (and probably illegal) ``bar'' being run out of a hotel room.
``I hate to mention this,'' said my assistant as we both stared at the slow, gyrating motions of a fursuited fennec fox doing what must have been intended to be the Dance of the Seven Veils. The dance was, of course, intended to be performed by women only, but so many male furs are effeminate enough to prevent this from being an issue. ``I think something's gone very wrong with me. I've got to bail out, Roland. I need to get the fuck away from this madness.''
``Fuck no!'' I declared. ``We came here to find the new hope for this shitty country, and now that we've dove headlong into this vagina-asshole, really gotten into the meat of this madness in some sort of macrophile's wet dream, you want to back out? Don't you understand there's no way through but forward?''
``Don't you understand? That's what's WRONG. The hope is supposed to be here, in this gigantic human sewer? Jesus, what the hell is up with you people?''
``None of that talk, you might offend the negroes.'' I remembered back to when my college cafeteria had been shut down for days by African-American protestors, just because some white foodservice employee had used the phrase ``you people'' when asking a large number of drunk blacks to either quiet down or take it out to the patio. America is the only country where a slip of the tongue cannot go unpunished, yet a lifetime of hypocrisy and oppression (Strom Thurman) is regarded as something to be respected and admired. No one cares how you behave, so long as you are consistent and never, ever sorry.
``Look over there.'' I said. ``Three skunks fucking a polar bear.'' My assistant blinked.
``They're selling Hardiman prints here? Man I gotta get my hands on that stuff...Nobody takes it to the limit like he does...'' My assistant blinked and then stared at the fennec some more, who was now out of veils and wiggling his rear at us. For what we paid for these drinks, his outfit should have at least been crotchless. ``How much money can you lend me?''
``What? Why?''
``I have to go. I need to go back to Canada. I need to wash the America off my skin.''
``Calm down, it's not that bad, besides, you go back home at the end of the semester anyway. Remember? You're going to graduate and never see me again.
``Shut the fuck up, man. I need to get OUT of here!'' I realized that he had finally hit rock bottom, and the only thing I could do was hope to discharge his madness and fear in a safe manner, like when a piece of luggage is detonated on the runway because they think it has a bomb in it. Of course it wasn't a bomb, it was actually a honey-baked turkey, but Hank Hill never was much for good luck anyway.
``Okay, let's pay our bill for these...Whatever these are, and head back to our hotel room.'' We both got up slowly, groggily, astounded that gravity had not forgotten us on our long holiday from its pull. Fucking physics, it never took any time off. My assistant ambled up to the still dancing fennec and whispered into his large furry ear.
``How much to take you back to my hotel room and fuck you raw?'' he asked. I imagine that if that suit could have blinked in confusion, it would have. I was certain its occupant was.
``What? What the fuck did he just say to me?'' The fennec had a broken, squeaky voice which instantly revealed why his suit was not crotchless: he was under eighteen, obviously. Far be it for an illegal bar to break laws concerning nudity and public exhibition, statutory rape was a lot more of a problem than alcoholism and sexual repression put together. I stepped in to avoid an scene.
``Never mind him, he's just joking around. I'll take him back to the room to sober up.''
``You'd better, he's starting to lose it.''
I managed to get my assistant as far as the escalator before he started to show some resistance. He refused to get on the thing until it stopped moving. ``It won't stop, it's not ever going to stop, not unless the power blows out.'' I said. I then noticed the emergency stop button, and wondered if he had madness enough to go for it but sense enough to open the little glass panel protecting it. The period before you totally lose it, when some of your faculties are still intact, is the most dangerous.
I finally got the balls to push him onto the escalator, hoping that his arms would swing out in front of him and prevent that sharp edge from jamming into his face. If it did, though, at least we could sue the elevator manufacturer and get enough money to retire off of. What a country, where you can hurt yourself by getting stone drunk and fall over, then force some hardworking escalator manufacturer to go out of business just so that you can get drunk in the privacy and safety of your own home. I just hoped they didn't have some sign up somewhere that said ``Don't shove your drunk friends around on the escalator, it has a sharp edge'' as this would invalidate the lawsuit. Lawsuits are no good if you're unoriginal, that's why you can never win when suing for the sake of the environment. We did that once with Silent Spring already, the earth was already saved forever when they agreed to stop making DDT.
He did manage to sort of catch himself, and rather than a cut he only received a mild bonk, but the noise he was making ensured everyone was watching us. This is very much not what I wanted. I yanked him to his feet and put both of his hands on the sliding handrail, letting him curse while I nodded politely and apologetically to the crowd watching us. Just nod your head and act like you know what you're doing and everyone will go on about their lives. I wonder if I could get away with murdering this fat fuck so long as I nodded politely to everyone while I was walking away, bloody knife still in my hand, ``excuse me, sorry to disturb you'' smile on my pasty white face.
``Don't run, you'll fall down and hurt yourself again.'' I said. We walked past discussions on fursuit making, past various showings of long-forgotten animated features, and various candy-pushers moving their sweet wares on unsuspecting con-goers. I sighed when we finally made it to the elevator, unaware of what we were getting ourselves in to.
We dashed out from the elevator and towards our room, desperately fumbling with the little card-key, which seemed to not work. ``Shit, they changed the lock on us!'' said my assistant. How, and why, would they do that? We hadn't done anything illegal, at least, not that they could know about. Holy crap, the maid must have discovered those big stacks of porn we'd pirated over IRC channels. She had probably reported us to every big name in the fandom, and we'd be unwelcome everywhere we went until we found some new subculture to bury ourselves in to. Why oh why did a culture which openly accepted child pornography have such a strict taboo on fapping to pictures you didn't pay for? Especially when you KNEW everyone did it, the just never admitted to it. Fuck, you were probably the only one who was pirating as little as you did.
I grabbed a nearby room service cart and charged at the door. This seemed to work, as the little light on the lock turned green and the door swung open wide at some point in the collision. Obviously I had scared the thing into obedience, and it had gone ahead with my bidding. I love it when technology heeds my demands, rather than showing me ads or touting its many unintelligible (and useless) extra features.
``Bolt everything shut!'' I said. ``They might be following us!'' My heart was pounding as I tried not to think about what we'd just done in the elevator. As I flipped every lock and turned the chains I looked over my shoulder to see my assistant staring at two room key cards, one of which was very clearly not his own. ``Where did that other one come from?''
``It's to Laredo's room. I took it so we could blast that fucker out of bed with a fire extinguisher.''
``What the fuck? We're going to leave Laredo alone, goddammit. That poor bastard's camera is the only think keeping Ivan thinking that we deserve this beautiful free ride he's given us. You must realize, of course, that he's with the Russian Mob and as soon as he finds out what the fuck we've been up to he'll castrate us. Especially when he hears what we did to Laredo just now.'' My assistant collapsed on the bed and began to sob, his large gelatinous body shaking like Santa in an earthquake.
``He took my baby girl...It was true love man, I saw it in her eyes.''
Ahh yes, the girl. She had been flirting with Laredo in the elevator, which made me question whether or not he was purely homosexual, and more just opportunistic. She was a short five feet, even in heels, but had the permed hair, makeup and fake tits that made me wonder what she was doing at this con. She'd clearly bought enough self confidence to leave the fur fandom, so what was she doing here? Was she Laredo's girlfriend or long term hooker or something? Surely someone that attractive would not get involved with this MUCK unless there was something in it for her.
My assistant pulled out a small utility knife and began to slice up some of the tangerines into pieces. More accurately, he hacked at them until they were a pulp, unsuitable even for drinking due to the filthy it was oozing across. ``I knew I should have taken out that little faggot when I had a chance. Now he has her...Fuck he's probably sodomizing her, reaming her ass till she has to wear a diaper like a bayfur.''
We had been in the elevator, me, my assistant, Laredo, the girl, and one other guy with a camera, who I presume was also with Laredo. The girl was flirting with Laredo when we got in, but she immediately began to flirt with us, her tight-knit shirt barely containing her large artificial breasts. She was an attention slut, among other things, and Laredo kept her on a long enough leash to let us slobber all over her.
``Hey, what are you boys doing here? Do you know Laredo? He's showing me around the con, this place is SO COOL!'' She was an airhead, or at least she pretended to be one, and I couldn't help but wonder if she was fondling Ursa's crotch. Fuck, I forgot, he was Dr. Friday by this point. In any event, I was immediately suspicious. While I had always suspected that Dr. Friday was hung like a horse, something that allowed him to compensate for his obesity, I knew that a girl would have to be pretty desperate to find this out.
The elevator stopped, but there was no one outside. Clearly they had given up and taken the stairs, something not uncommon when the average wait for an elevator was ten minutes. Someone hit the door close button and we continued on our way, just as I saw my assistant's lusty eyes begin to peak. I presume I have some sort of ``spider sense'' or at least ``fox sense'' that lets me on to approaching danger, but unlike Spiderman, mine always kicks in too late.
``We're here having fun, yeah, we know Laredo...And I can show you something else a lot more interesting. A big fucker, who'd be real happy to see you.'' Even an airhead couldn't miss a pass like that, and somewhere deep in that head I could sense she was smarter than she let on, and wasn't about to take shit like that. Before she could do anything, though, the man in the corner (the one who was Brazilian but not Laredo) gave out one of those little cough-speaks when you want to pretend to disguise what you're saying.
-cough cough- ``Bullshit.'' -cough-
``What the fuck did you just say?'' I grew tense, my fight-or-flight response kicking in just as nature had intended. In retrospect, this was the moment in which nature overwhelmed the man-made drugs wreaking havoc on my system, and forced me from ``reality'' back into Reality. ``I said, what the fuck did you just say?''
Penis size is the one thing every guy seems to care about above and beyond all else. I sometimes think I'm missing out on an essential part of male culture, because unlike almost all those around me, I seem to have no urge to prove the size of my penis without a specific request to do so. I've always been told I was large, but not freakishly so, and since my dick has yet to cheat on me or treat me wrong I've always been quite fond of the little fucker. Most guys though, even those who I know are bigger than me, seem bound and determined they're well endowed, through stupid stunts and verbal assaults only Stephen Colbert could actually get away with. And Stephen has the biggest balls of all, it's no wonder he's always sitting behind a desk or table or something. How the fuck does he walk with those? I mean, I SAW the White House Press Dinner...thing...Whatever it was.
My assistant charged the man, his ex-rugby-player body almost smothering the poor Brazilian in the corner, who now clearly understood that freedom of speech existed in name only. ``You want me to fuck you up, you toothpick-dicked little faggot?'' I was desperately watching the floor indicator count up, and when the door opened to our floor I sunk my foot into the back of my assistant's leg, causing him to fall down and make him easier to drag out as he stumbled for balance. Thank you Vilari's Karate Center. Before you got obsessed with teaching me katas and going through energy medicine exercises, I actually fucking learned something.
This of course led to the incident with the door lock and the room service tray, and then our present situation. My assistant was sitting and switching between depression and violence as the sum total of our horrible experience came crashing down on him all at once, breaking him into a thousand pieces. I spent a few moments staring at him before deciding that the best thing for me to do was to let him baste in his on sauce.
``Listen, I'm going to go get some fresh air. You just sit here and relax. Take some tussin, some sleeping pills, whatever you need to get yourself some fucking sleep. We both need plenty of rest about now.'' I knew that ever since the Clean Skies Initiative that Dubya clean air wasn't something you could get within the borders of this Great Nation, but it seemed like a good excuse, and I figured this Kanuk might actually buy it. I fled with surprising speed for someone who had not had a true meal or decent sleep for days, and even found myself descending fifteen flights of stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. Going down was, of course, much easier than going up.
What the fuck was I doing here? Was I really out on some quest for some mystical hope for this god-forsaken country, or was I out on some selfish, drug-induced mad-grab for pornography and smug superiority? I was, at this point, swimming in both, as my overstuffed backpack and slick self confidence would indicate. Shit, I'd forgotten all about Ivan. What did he want me to do again? Play tour guide to some enthusiastic, slutbanging Brazilian named Laredo? Surely even a Mafioso didn't have that sort of money to squander on an irresponsible, ungrateful wretch like me.
I wandered around and found a small huddle of furs playing Magic: The Gathering around a table. I used to be quite good at the game, and figured I might as well give it a shot. I had kept up to date with it, after all, and I might as well bilk out a little more return on my investment. Shit, if I'd bought stock in Google instead of Magic cards, I probably could have retired at this point.
I watched for awhile, asking and answering questions when they came up. I noticed the two players had an astounding amount of tension between them considering it was supposed to be a friendly game. This was odd. I remembered that, when I used to play, both myself and my opponents were casual and relaxed, and rarely haggled over the rules unless it was something that could make-or-break a game in which a prize depended on. These two, however, seemed like suicide bombers waiting for an excuse to press the button. When I pulled off the top card of one of the libraries to see exactly what he'd put back into his deck, one of the players went off on me, unleashing tension and frustration by accusing me of being someone he did not know, and thus a card thief. He was half right, since he did not know me, but I had no intention of stealing twenty cents worth of his cardboard crack. He lost soon after, probably because he was watching my hands too closely, and went off in a huff, blaming me for his loss.
I decided maybe I shouldn't play, but the guy who'd won insisted, most likely because he'd run out of opponents to beat up. After borrowing a deck and getting into it, I quickly found out why. The guy was the sort of asshole player you desperately never wanted to play against in any game. He trash-talked like an NBA all star, and whenever he played something especially devastating he would shove the card in and out of your face, going ``Ooom-psh! Ooom-psh!'' as if he was attempting to imitate the sort of back-beats used only in porno. I lost miserably, of course. My own deck was something someone had slapped together in a hurry, and ran more like a soap box derby car than the finely tuned Ferrari my opponent had.
I was tempted to slap the little bastard and give him a firm dose of reality, to let him know that even though he could beat me when the odds were vastly in his favor, I was bigger, stronger, older, and meaner than he was, AND my dick was gigantic. But I just shut up and walked away, ignoring his taunts. Just learn to enjoy losing. Fuck, by this point, you've lost so much, you should love it by now, you fucking masochist. And in any event, losing is definitely part of the New Hope for America. After all, we live in a country where only the very best, only the #1s, happen to matter. Wouldn't the new hope somehow involve us silver medallist getting a slice of the big pie? Maybe things would change, wouldn't be like those swim meets I went to as a kid. The one time I ended up having only a single other guy in my class, we're paired up for eight matches, and he beats me every single time. I asked him if he'd throw one match, just so I could get a single gold medal, but he refused. Not for any moral reason, but because he knew that his parents would love him less if he didn't beat the other kid eight times in a row. I, however, had nothing to lose, since my parents didn't love me at all.
My assistant was in the bathtub when I made my way back up to the room. He was bathing in some sort of sweet-smelling muck. Either he'd added some sort of bath salts, or he'd poured a lot of flavored sugar into the thing. In any event he had a laptop plugged into the wall, blasting out various video clips he'd downloaded off the internet. First a series of bizarre Japanese ads, and then that ridiculous WoW machima video in tune with ``The Internet is For Porn,'' something which had been shown to death and which I had never found as funny as the original (Studio Q) in the first place.
I hit the ``mute'' button on the keyboard and looked around. Various chemical containers were scattered about, all empty. I picked up a small proscription vial and recoiled in horror as I read the label. ``Shit, did you eat all this Prozac?''
The problem with modern antidepressants is that after the overwhelming rush of intense good feeling, there's a big letdown when your body runs out of dopamine and has to make another rush-batch. It's the point where you're most likely to kill yourself, when the damn pills can't get you back into your happy place no matter how many you popped. I sincerely hoped he'd been vomiting up some of those foul drugs, but through the multicolored muck in the tub I had no idea. And I wasn't about to go rummaging around to check if Dr. Friday had left a nice big spit for the maid to clean up.
``You fucking moron. I hope you didn't manage to keep all this down. I'm not about to induce vomiting on your suicidal ass if you can't deal with this mess. For chrissakes, you're what, thirty something at this point? I'm twenty-one and my head is more level than you. You've got no one but yourself to blame at this point.''
``Turn that laptop back on, man! I gotta see...Gotta see it, gotta get it into my brain.''
``Gotta get what, you druggie bastard?''
``You know that song with the little white bunny with the number on his chest? You know, `Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me?' I fuckin' gotta hear it man...''
``Fuck you. I'm out of here. You can kill yourself on your own time.''
``Wait man, what are friends for, man? You should fucking help me end my pain, you bastard...Plug those big speakers in, then, right when the bunny shows me his own asshole, I want you to chuck them into the tub.'' I stared at the emotional train wreck lying naked in the tub in front of me. This thirty-something, who'd been a friend of mine for years, was asking me to kill him, because he was too pussy to deal with Reality once the drugs wore off. Fuck. Nothing to it but to do it, I guess.
``Shit, what are friends for?'' I plugged the speakers into the wall, and then into the laptop, then held them up with my hands, like I was some great Atlas of Sony, or some bizarre scales, judging the two ten-pound monsters to be of exactly equal weight in my mighty arms. Dr. Friday began to moan and groan as the song carried on, and I imagined his intense sexual frustration was wreaking havoc on his slowly aging body, which he assumed was something no woman would ever want (wrongly, as I was later to find).
The peak began to approach with startling speed, and I held up the speakers as high as I could. There had to be a way out of this. Opportunities always present themselves in a moment of crisis. If they don't, the plot won't twist quite as well as it should, and your game will have no replay value since the storyline is too flat. When the moment finally came, I saw him close his eyes in terror of what he expected to happen. Thinking quickly, I dropped the speakers and grabbed the tangerine I'd stashed in my pocket oh so long ago. This is why I'd taken it, obviously: everything made sense. I just had to smash Dr. Friday in the forehead with this piece of fruit, and the world would return to normal, and somehow this would make Mario rescue the Princess. It didn't have to make sense, it was from Japan.
He roared with rage as he was suddenly brought back from the brink of despair, angered that he'd have to continue to face the slings and arrows of existence instead of tossing off this mortal coil. He charged at me, a wet, blubbery mass of rage and discontent, but I was ready for him and grabbed the rod holding up the bath curtains and pulled it back and off, waving at him menacingly. ``Don't fuck with me, you whale bastard, I am QUEQUEG!''
The pole did not have the intended effect, though, and I made a strategic advance to the rear, dashing out into the main of the hotel room. I grabbed a lamp and held it over my head menacingly, hoping that I wouldn't have to actually attack. Fuck, they'd make me explain things. He looked at me, frustrated, dripping water onto the carpet. ``You'd do that, wouldn't you? Bean me upside the fucking head with that goddamn lamp?''
``Just a few minutes ago, you wanted me to kill you, you fucking sexually frustrated bastard. Why don't you just BUY a girlfriend? Fuck, on your income, you could get a nice little fourteen-year-old Filipino girl to suck your dick twenty-four hours a day. Especially since you work out of the home.''
``Fuck you, man. You don't understand my pain!''
``No, I DO, and that's the whole problem here. Now look, I need some fucking rest. Go throw up, go take some pills, just do whatever you need to do, but I have a job to do tomorrow. One that I didn't do today, and I only have two more days to do it.'' My assistant nodded, then began to amble back towards the bathroom.
``Fuck man, you're right, you've got a fucking job to do. I'm gonna fucking leave you to it man, you've got a lot more to do than I do, fuck...I totally forgot, you need to help Laredo for Ivan's sake. Fuck man, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interfere.''
Once he went back into the bathroom I propped a chair up against the door, intent on getting some peace and quiet for as long as possible. Things wouldn't heat up again until ten AM, and I intended to get a good six hours sleep before that point. I laid down on the bed and looked over to the hotel clock radio. I fumbled with it a minute, until I was able to get it tuned to whatever the local NPR radio station was. NPR was the only thing that could get me to sleep in a situation like this. I needed the calm, relaxed tempo of classical music, something to drown out the crazed randomness of the modern insanity.
My mind, despite its clutter, is an amazingly quiet place. As such, sudden external shocks tend to startle me, to get me going. To put my adrenaline into high-gear and get my FoF (fight or flight) response ready to go. Small things can easily snap me from my happy place and turn me into a blonde-haired shock-troop, ready and raring for action.
This presents problems in the modern world: it's nigh to impossible for me to get the privacy and inattention that I crave. In a world where everyone expected to have a cell phone, and to leave it on (even in the movie theatre) it's simply hard to find time to myself, away from the noise and clutter.
I think this is what first attracted me to the internet, aside from an overwhelming desire to find out if there were any pornographic images of the Sonic the Hedgehog girls, and then to download such images, was the fact that it offered privacy and anonymity. Most people think that the internet has eroded privacy, and to those who aren't careful, it certainly has. For me, however, the anonymity it provides, along with the completely overwhelming amount of people existing within it, is the ultimate example of privacy. No one can see you in the undecipherable muck that is The Internet. There's just too many bastards standing around you. Someone fires a shot into the net, other bodies will absorb it. Someone charges the group, they'll never even make it to you. It's only those out on the edges who are at risk. God, no wonder those antelope are always clinging to one another when the lion shows up.
When the internet bubble showed up, there was a brief moment when the internet MEANT something. It was a phenomenon that no one understood, but something that was very special to be a part of. You knew you were in on something great, and all you wanted was the hand-stamp that let you come back as many times as you wanted. A billion little groups, fandoms, subcultures...Call them what you will, they all showed up on the internet, eager to connect, to create, to convert more members to their little cults. Interests and hobbies could now become lifestyles, with hundreds of thousands of people just as dumb as you wanting to hang on every word you had to type. It was beautiful in its awfulness, like a nuclear explosion or the collapse of the World Trade Center.
The Fur Fandom was just another one of these little things going on, and what with Disney's Robin Hood and the Redwall series in my past, it was inevitable that I would get sucked right into the heart of it. My libido was a factor, I think, considering I grew up in a sexually oppressive culture, but was horny even for a teenaged male. I still am. Fuck, I can get off five times in a day, and still want more. If I could convince some sperm banks to take me in for the weekend, I could retire.
I was attracted to the porn, yes, but also the feeling of belonging. Here was a culture where the standards were low and the burden of proof was high. A no-talent hack could become king, just as a genuinely gifted individual could wallow in obscurity. Up was down. Left was right. In this world of no-talents, I knew I'd have my chance to shine, since I was the most untalented of them all.
Somehow I managed to avoid all drama and bother, with the exception of an incident with my now ex-girlfriend, which still rears up and bites me now and then. But that must be expected, exes are always a fucking bother, unless one of you dies, thus solving the problem. This of course means both of us will live forever, throwing darts at one another, for reasons we can't even begin to remember. But in any event I was mildly successful. I made friends. I acquired useless skills, talent and knowledge. I got deeply involved in the camp. I masturbated at record levels only dreamed about by most fap addicts. Life was good, so long as I shoved Reality far to the side.
But nothing's perfect forever, and in the Fur Fandom, every fur eventually finds a breaking point, where they can't stand it any more, where the shitwater is well above their head and all they want is out. Though certain events may trigger a mass exodus, the decision to leave the fandom, or at least when one finally wakes up and is repulsed by what's around him, is always a personal event followed up by a personal decision. Often it's due to something petty, such as an argument or incident of art piracy. Other times, like in my case, it's because you can watch the entire fandom get up and take a step over that line that even you won't cross, leaving you on the other side, unwilling to tag along with the madness any further. Because I was the latter, I never really left the fandom, it left me.
The incident in which this occurred was, of course, the decision for FurAffinity to permit ``cub art.'' This contributed to a mass exodus, like many other things, but I only cared about it from one aspect. There are islands all over the world which host websites that have only set up one rule: no child porn. Credit card theft? Certainly. Online gambling? Why not? Software piracy? As China found, it's a great way to build up one's informational infrastructure at no cost. But photographs of naked or fucking people under the legal age? No. Never. It's the one rule on the internet, the one rule that exists even in /b/, a place where there should be no rules.
The Fur Fandom is home to some pretty crazy shit, of course. Where else can you see a Vixen the size of a skyscraper start jamming other furs into her cunt, while grabbing and jerking off a dick that's even bigger than she is? The term ``furfag'' had long since stopped being applied only to homosexual, overly aggressive furries who posted up wolf-dicks on otherwise non-furry imageboards. The Fandom was finally about to reach its critical mass, where it was big enough for people to pay attention to it, for good or ill. This was the one time we needed to bother to care about our appearance to the outside world, before clamming up like a Scientology lecture meeting.
And we fucking blew it. FurAffinity was where people went when they wondered what furry was, and if they should get involved, and the first thing they saw was that they had violated the internet's only rule: no porn until 18. Yes, the rule is arbitrary and unenforced, but that doesn't mean you can openly, broadly stand in opposition to it. It is simply the elephant in the room that you refuse to acknowledge, because it is the one thing that society has decided is not appropriate here. Just as all societies in the real world have, through practical experience, agreed to disallow theft, murder and dishonesty (outside of Washington DC), the Internet has decided that CP just doesn't cut it. It's too hot to touch, and anyone peddling it is hunted down like dogs, along with anyone who happened to be in the room or along the way.
That's why, whenever I look at the wall of a hotel room at a fur con, I can see the big brown water mark where things got too high, and I broke and turned back.
I was overpowered by the urge to flee. Maybe it was some innate vulpine instinct, sensing danger and urging me to seek better, if not higher, ground from which to defend myself. Money was a factor, I think. Even with Ivan's help, I would no doubt spend myself into slavery if I stayed here any longer. Fuck, how much had I squandered on porn already at this point? By my nearest calculations, I'd managed to run up a porn bill somewhere between $30-$35 for twenty-five consecutive hours. How could this happen? I could buy prostitutes with that kind of cash. Had I even bothered to look at my collection? I had to be buying multiples at this point. Fuck, where was I gonna PUT it?
By the time these questions had come to mind, there was no one to get answers from but myself. Not in that I MUST answer them myself, since they are rhetorical, but in that my assistant had made a break for it. His stuff was gone, minus a few small things not worth coming back for. This was a strong signal to me to make a break for it. To stuff everything and run. But this was, of course, suspicious. Time to call up those polacks and tip them heavily. They're from a country where bribery is the norm, they'll understand. Don't mention the eighty pounds of coffee stuffed into the back seat of the nice young American's hatchback and you'll earn more than twice as much as normal this hour. God these were good people.
I knew they'd pack the car to the point of bursting, and it made me wonder what I'd do if and when I finally got pulled over by the cops. Not for speeding or reckless driving, of course. They let that kind of shit slide. But I knew that as soon as my out-of-state license plate was spotted along with a failure to signal on an empty road when changing lanes, some cop would pull me over. What would I do then?
Yes of course officer, I have all this stuff just for myself. It's all legal, so there's nothing you can do. Yes of course I have proscriptions for everything that needs `em, for you see, I'm a sick man. A very sick man, in fact. I was just on my way for another expensive, non-social-medicine operation, to suck a few drops off the giant corporate teat that is my health insurance. Yes officer, I support the fact that there's two managers per doctor in most hospitals, and that each one of them gets paid more than the doctor. That's capitalism at work, just like how you can't fire incompetent doctors, and how nurses are treated like garbage and paid at the same rate as the security guards. Low wages mean strong economies, yessir.
Get a grip, man. You're falling into your own traps. I turned on the TV and spent a few minutes watching C-SPAN, redirecting my anger and frustration towards fucks I certainly hoped I hadn't voted for. You can never be sure with those Diebold machines.
It felt good to externalize my anger. I wasn't the messed up one here, they were. These fat, rich corporate fucks who are to our founding fathers what crack-smoking television thieves are to Martin Luther King Jr. They were the reason this country sucked, not I. They made me powerless and helpless. There was no reason for me to resist their rule. Just bow down to the bastards and be a good little sycophant, and you can whine all you want. Just vote a straight-party ticket come November. Once I felt relaxed enough to stop blaming myself, I got up and grabbed my stuff.
I made my way through the lobby, intending to walk down to the garage and get the hell out of here without bothering to check out (the later they started looking for me, I thought, the greater the lead I'd start out with) when some obese monstrosity came lumbering towards me. He began to smother me with inappropriate hugging and touching, letting me know that he recognized my name from somewhere and was about to demonstrate his social handicap. Fuck, was I still wearing my badge? Did I honestly expect to escape while still wearing the goddamn thing?
tm! How's it been going for you?'' He said all this while his gigantic man-boobs were pressed against my stomach. Shit, how could something so short be so fat? It made no sense. Those stubby little legs could not possibly support that much weight, and yet, I saw it happening before my eyes. ``Don't you remember me? We talked online!''
Ahh yes, online. We've ALL talked online by this point, dipshit. You might as well ask me to remember you from that time we rode on a bus together, or on a plane, or were in the same classroom at the same time. And in any event, did you ever bother to think that maybe, if I wanted to talk to you, I'd have hunted you down by now? You DID think of that, didn't you? And the only conclusion you could derive was to grab me the first chance you saw, for fear that I might, in your warped definition, be standing you up. Grow up and start buying a girlfriend, please. I don't have time for your WoW-induced anatomy.
``Let's have lunch!'' he said as I mumbled and extracted my way out of his grasp. The door was so fucking close at this point. All I had to do was get there. Just keep moving. You're not as sick and tired as you were six hours ago, you can make it. All you have to do is get-
``Hold it right there, mister...Duke, is it? We have some questions for you.'' Holy shit, where the fuck did that con-staffer come from? I was just minding my own business, trying to get to a door which is apparently an infinite distance from myself, when this guy shows up in his fancy little red shirt demanding my attention. Had the fat man from Taps tipped him off to my presence? Was I in for it now?
I straightened up and decided to remain calm. Your average person will, when confronted by a person with unpaid authority, begin to explode and rage out of the indignity of being inconvenienced momentarily. This is wrong. It's exactly the response they're looking for, the non-monetary reward which makes that tiny bit of authority they've been handed all the more worthwhile. It also arouses their contempt and their tiny libido, neither of which are things which work in your favor. No, you must remain calm, cool and collective. Polite. Friendly, even. At the very least, this means that if they decide to cart you off to some Nazi-fur controlled condemnation board, you'll be smiling all the way to the gas chamber. It makes it easier for others to be sympathetic to your martyrdom, and may save your reputation, if not your life.
``What the hell do you think you're doing?'' he said. This one was not like the others. He was not fat or short. He was tall. Self confident. Probably a cop or soldier in the real world. This meant that he was most likely coming at me out of a sense of duty, which was very good for me. He would not, after all, do anything stupid that might stain his sense of honor. He was just here to take out the trash: me.
He reached over my shoulder and grabbed onto something sticking out of my backpack. Shit, I'd been displaying pornography in the open, a big no-no at this stickers-over-naughty-bits con. As he pulled it out to show it to me, I almost lost my cool. Of all the porn to have sitting out in the open, it had to be printouts of something I'd pirated off the internet. And not just anything: stuff my ex had drawn, and then accused me of stealing.
I will never understand why I saved those images, much less printed them out. Granted, my ex had refused to sell them to me, but through my usual network of straw-buyers I was able to attain them anyway, without even having to pay anything extra. Why, then, had I saved copies of those same images when they popped up on some pirate-infested imageboard? Did some part of my sixth sense let me know that, some day, I would be accused of being the pirate who posted them, thus leading me to think that I might as well bloody my hands in a crime I'd be accused of anyway? Was I just some sort of moron who was asking for trouble? It had to be the latter, though it is true that I was eventually blamed for the act of piracy, and got a very nasty e-mail about it. Least I think it was nasty. I deleted it pretty much right away.
``Shit, you caught me. No point in fighting it, I'm a fucking art pirate. Just point me in the right direction and I'll apologize before handing myself over to police.'' I have found that by confessing to the crime immediately, you can actually get out of it. Almost all criminals insist that what they did was right, lawful, justified, or that they didn't do it at all. By confessing without any prompting to exactly what they already have condemned you of being, you can trip them up. I have learned this over a lifetime of being accused of crimes I never got the chance to commit (though in retrospect, I wish I had, since I often got punished for them) and I assure you it works.
``That's a...strange attitude to have.'' he said. He stuffed what he had in his hand into the garbage, but didn't go digging around for more dirt. Which is odd, since he must have been able to see plenty of it from the unzipped, porn-vomiting tumor attached to my back. Had I somehow knocked him off balance.
``Why? I know it was wrong, but I did it anyway. I'm a responsible person, I know the consequences of my actions.'' He was desperate to salvage the situation at this point. He had to go back to being a cop, but clearly he could not smash me under his boot like some shirtless redneck on COPS. He needed to be firm, but forgiving. As far as he knew, I was genuine in my remorse. Too much or too little punishment would turn me into another Sibe, and that was not something the fandom needed right now. There were enough crazy, illegal-gun-toting art pirates running around these days. Don't make any more. Especially one who knows your face and steals from his ex. Because only truly evil people would ever be resentful and bitter towards people they had a frivolous and failed internet relationship with.
He proceeded to launch into a schpiel about how poor artists are, how they work so hard for this, and are so under appreciated. I knew it all to be true, but at this point I had no sympathy for these devils. Furry artists are the lowest of the low in the art world. Their audience is tiny and the market is flooded massively beyond capacity. They are underpaid, overpirated and even the best ones can barely break even. Anyone who got into the fandom and didn't understand that basic fact from day 1 did not deserve my sympathy. They had dug their own graves, all I was doing was tossing some of the dirt on top.
He was just about to let me go, telling me he would tell no one if I agreed to never commit an act of piracy again (I of course said yes, just like when people ask me if I believe in God) I felt his hand go to my thigh. While I admit I normally like such attention, it's not the sort of thing I intend to ask for after being chewed out. If he wanted to work off his power-induced chubby, he'd need to go make a break into the bathroom, not come fucking with me. ``I'm very lonely, you know. Can I have a kiss before I let you go?''
You have to go a pretty long way to make a fox feel violated, yet at that moment I did. Gee, sir, I appreciate this break you're giving me so much that I want you to bang my tight little asshole, just to say thanks. Get a grip, just move quietly and calmly away from it all. Hopefully next time you look back, he'll be gone.
I headed out quickly, dodging in-between large people in hopes of throwing him off my scent as it were. In any event he'd have to shove some people out of his way and be as rude as I was to catch up, and I hoped his pride would prevent such convenient speed. I presume that it worked, because I soon found myself sitting in that rented little hybrid car, tooling around aimlessly in downtown Pittsburgh, unsure exactly how to take flight at this point. I had no maps, and knew only of the way I came in. This route I could not take, of course: they would be looking for me there. As I drove around aimlessly, I suddenly put my foot all the way down on the brake, some instinctive force reacting to something truly hideous within my line of sight.
Shit, there he was! Tobey Maguire, or at least that guy we picked up who looked like him! The deer was just standing on the street corner and smiling, still wearing that same retarded Mickey Mouse shirt and hauling around luggage. Was he really not a fur after all, just your everyday, illegal-ride-taking freak?
I jammed the car into reverse and just made a go for it. Fuck what was happening, I needed a phone. Not my cell phone, of course. First off I hated it, and second I would never find it in this mess (quite true, I have never seen it again). I needed to call my assistant and figure out what the fuck was going on. Maybe I could escape through the same time-portal he jumped through. It was my only hope.
Payphones are very hard to find in the 21st century (I think they're illegal) but I eventually did come across one that even had a dial tone and accepted my quarters. I rung up the American cell phone of my assistant, hoping it was not only still functional, but within range of his grabbing at it. Just before it rolled over to voice mail he picked it up.
``Hello? Who is this? It isn't some god-damned telemarketer is it?''
``No, it isn't, it's Roland you damned Canadian bastard! I need your fucking help IMMEDIATELY!''
``Woah woah woah. Calm down, man. Where are you?''
``At a pay phone, on...'' I mumbled some names, rather than bother to read the street signs. ``I'm still in town, of course. How the fuck did you get out of here? It's a goddamned death trap, they're going to hunt me down and chop my head off like some western reporter in Iraq.''
``Why aren't you in the hotel room? Didn't you get my e-mail?'' Of course I didn't, jackass. You know damn well that my laptop rarely, if ever, happens to work, and that I'm not about to plop down $10 just to have access to wireless internet in my room for twelve consecutive hours. ``Laredo sent Ivan those photos, and Ivan is so pleased, he wants us to cover the Executive Conference being held Saturday evening. You know, when all the big shots get together and talk about what's wrong with the fandom. He wants to be totally up to date on everything they say. Even sent us some cash for recording equipment. You know where there's an electronics store around here?''
``Uh...Yeah. This is all a big joke. I'm buying a really fancy electric gizmo for my iPod to make it record music right now. I just wanted to see if you really knew what's up. Don't come near here, they don't like foreigners. I'll be right over.''
I decided that, while I was out and about, it was high-time for me to ditch this little thing in favor of something much better. I was sick and tired of this cramped, underpowered, Japanese-made vehicle. It was much, much too practical for my current mood, and thus had to go. I made good on my lie by snagging myself some recording equipment that would end up being totally useless, then made my way to the airport.
The Pittsburgh airport is a disturbingly long ways away from the actual city, though I assume this is some necessity of the fact that the city is full of bridges and historical sites, thus making no room for airplanes. The car rental agencies that service the airport are farther yet, but as I had plenty of time and no need to concern myself with gas, I didn't mind the extra trip. As I pulled into the customer parking lot, I hoped that I had selected the right agency. Did these things still have a deal where you could return your car to another place, so long as it was owned by the same company? I doubted it, since this was the self-serve era after all. Every company just gave you a big razor-coated dildo and told you to go fuck yourself, and you were damned grateful for it. After all, they had let you live, at least this time.
I came in and gave the man at the desk a load of bullshit about how I ``couldn't breathe'' in that tiny little clown-car made by Pearl-Harbor-Bombing jap bastards. He looked to be the History Channel type, what with his age, weight, and crew cut, and he bit it hook line and sinker. Soon I found myself sitting in a large, bright-white convertible with a fuel efficiency rating only the Saudis could love. Granted, this being the self-service age I had to toss a rather large quantity of stuff from the small car into the big one, and I had to pay some big fee to have my car sent back to its point of origin, but since everything was going on to an illegal credit card, I didn't care. Some anonymous people would have their annual APRs go up a little higher, and some rich corporate fatcat would have to steal more money from his underlings to get an even bigger Christmas bonus this year. We're all fucked at this point, does it even matter who's doing the fucking?
I drove back into town with the top down, the sum total of my stash sitting in the gigantic trunk. I could cart corpses or smuggle Mexicans across the border in that thing. What had filled up most of the back seat and the entire trunk in the Suppository was nothing to the Great White. There was still enough room in there for more, if it became necessary, and the back seat was completely untouched.
I took in deep breaths of this thick, polluted air. Where did it all come from, anyway? All the industry in America had been outsourced to China by this point. Was this really all from cars? It had to be. And of course I, in the Great White, was only contributing to the problem. Fuck it, I'm only borrowing this car. I didn't set out to destroy the environment to make my penis feel bigger, like a Hummer owner. Besides, jet planes probably did a lot more damage than this car ever would, and as long as the Feds kept bailing out that bloated and deregulated industry, things weren't about to change.
I pulled into the exact same hotel I had pulled into on Thursday, only in a different car. This must happen a lot, because he simply nodded and said ``Yessir,'' not even bothering to comment on the fact that my car was now twice as big as before. Did he not even wonder why I'd replaced my tiny, earth-friendly hybrid with something truly American? Was he in on the New Hope for America? I made a note to check in with this man later, as he clearly knew something I did not.
I felt an overwhelming need to kill something at this point, so I decided to go to the game room, the very same place I had failed to find in my drug-induced stupor the previous night. On my way I realized that I had not consumed any drugs in awhile, and that as such, they had all worn off and I was now truly aware of how tired and hungry I was. I stopped in at some little overpriced hotel snack bar and bought some truly hideous sandwiches, coffee, and orange juice. I wolfed it all down in an animalistic frenzy, not caring about table manners, or even spills for that matter. All that was important was that I got this delicious, awful food into my body, so it would stop whining enough for me to get into that room and kill some poor pixilated bastard over and over again.
To my dismay the only shooting game available was HALO. I hate HALO, even though it is a fine game, because it is so overplayed that you can't ever pick up a controller without being outclassed by everyone around you. Did these people have even less of a life than I did? Did they just sit around playing HALO and smoking weed all day? If they did, how did they ever manage to afford their way out here? Exactly how many people did Ivan have on his payroll anyway?
Once my lust for violence was satisfied and I'd been killed enough times to get frustrated, I realized that I had not asked for my bags to be sent back up to my room. Such service was complimentary, since I was already paying well over one hundred dollars each night, and I felt that I might be squandering an opportunity bestowed upon me by the concierge's benevolence. Plus, those nice polacks might take it as an insult that I did not let them cart my luggage for tips again. The last thing I needed was a bunch of hungry, overworked, ex-conscript polacks out to get me. Especially when they had keys to every hotel room in the entire building. Jesus, what if they came at me at two AM with their AKs and military helmets and camouflage clothing? I'd be really fucked then. Definitely worth the $2 in tips I'd have to hand off to them. Fuck, give `em $5.
I walked up to the front desk, but in front of me was some squat, buzz-cut, angry man who looked like the poster boy for penis enlargement pills. He definitely had an axe to grind, and a need to overcompensate, as he was chewing out some poor homosexual Scandinavian standing behind the counter. The tall, lanky, well dressed man was taking a surprising amount of abuse, and though I rather wanted to talk to him, I took a few moments to watch the scene.
In my experience, I have found that it is possible to be a nice person, but also be extremely prejudiced. My father, for example, is frighteningly homophobic. In spite of this, he is a polite, cordial, and well mannered almost all of the time. He's even nice to most gays, at least to their face. He just loses it whenever gay people demand things like equal representation under the law, or that their life partners receive equal legal status to that of a spouse (while not permitting other family members like sons and daughters to achieve the same status). As such, I try not to be too hard on prejudiced people, because I know that very often they are just hamstrung by outmoded ideas or perceptions.
Fatty McBuzzcut wasn't making it easy, though. Through the screaming and yelling and throwing of objects, I was able to determine that he had not known that there would be a fur con in the hotel this weekend. As such, he felt that he was entitled to a big refund, an apology from a manager, and a free ride to a hotel ``not overrun by freaks and faggots.'' Rather than, say, point out that in this modern world there weren't any such places outside of the bottom of the Mariana trench (at least until they finished building a gay bar there) the man behind the counter just stood and nodded. This was very important, I told myself. That man's body language and behavior show that not only is he superior in this situation, but that he has full and complete control of what's going on.
Despite all his rage, Fatty McBuzzcut was still a rat in a cage: he'd already paid for one night, and the hotel wasn't going to give that back. If he wanted to stay somewhere else, well, he didn't belong in this hotel anyway. He was making the other, paying guests feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, and thus would receive no sympathy from the staff. When he finally began to run out of steam, I seized my moment and stepped in.
``'scuse me here, just let me get this done and I'll be out of your way...I just finished picking up some things, you see, and I'd like your boys to cart my luggage and supplies up to the room. It's very heavy, and I'd hate to burden your non-freight elevators with all of it. Plus I have a bad back, despite my young age. And while I'm here, I'd like to ask that you send up a nice steak and some rum around six. I've got an incredible craving for steak. Just put it on the tab.''
The Scandie nodded and punched things into his computer, still saying nothing, but nodding and smiling at the end of his keystrokes, letting me know that all I'd asked for would be delivered in short order. Fuck, there might even be a little extra. My calm, quiet politeness had stood out in stark contrast to the anger coming from the short man I'd just cut off prematurely. Surely that had to stand for SOMEthing.
As I backed off, I heard Fatty get his second wind, and come back even more enraged than before, since the hotel obviously valued my business much more than his. I was tempted to stay and see if he'd be hauled off in handcuffs, but instead I headed up towards the room. When I got there and put my key into the lock, I found the room to be pitch black. Quite odd, considering it was mid-afternoon in summer. The lights were off, the blinds were closed...What was going on?
All of a sudden, from nowhere, something small and thin attacked my legs. ``Holy shit! What the fuck?'' I fumbled for the light switch, until I could see the wiry, mat-haired thing attacking my legs. It was naked, lightly built, and female. It was also digging it's teeth into my calves, threatening my Achilles' tendons. I yelled and kicked, more out of surprise than any sense of malice. I'm a pretty tough guy, and I can withstand a lot of physical abuse. I used to do full-contact karate, after all. Heh. That almost spells FuCK, doesn't it?
``Woah, woah! Hold it, Merriam. This is mister Roland. He's my friend, and your friend too. He's a very smart fox, and he LOVES artists.'' I looked over to the bed which, in the rough lighting, I could clearly see to be quite disheveled. There was a number of used condoms sitting in the garbage can next to the night stand, indicating they had been going at it for quite some time. ``Her name is Merriam, like Maid Merriam, from Disney's Robin Hood. She's a very sweet little vixen, and a big fan of Jack. She came all the way from Montana just to show David Hopkins her paintings of angels.'' I looked around, and realized there were disturbingly religious paintings all over the walls. Furry angels, Jesus figures...It was some form of perverse, but well intentioned form of blasphemy and ink. I wanted to recoil in horror, but Merriam was still holding my legs tight. She had stopped biting me, at least. I could see, now, that she looked very young. Downright loli. This scared me to no end: what had this drunken kanuk done in his lust induced frenzy? I decided to speak with him in private, but first, I would need to coax him out using code.
``Hows about uyay and Iyay ogay out to the allwayhay and talk about the...olilay?'' He blinked at me, but had enough sense to put on some boxers and stumble out into the hallway, leaving Merriam in the room. When we were out of her line of sight, I grabbed my assistant by the shoulders and pushed him up against the wall with all my weight. He was startled: I can be surprisingly strong when the situation calls for it. ``Okay you bastard, what the fuck do you think you're doing? You want to get us all shoved into the 4Chan Party Van? There's a fucking LOLI in our hotel room, and she's naked!''
``Jesus, Roland, calm the fuck down man. She's totally 100% legal, she told me herself.''
``Don't you think I believe that for a fucking second. One LOOK at her and you can tell she's underage. You're totally fucked, my man. And they'll take me in as an accessory. I'm not going to jail cus because you wanted to stick it in her pooper!'' He blinked, then slowly slid down the wall, like a wad of well-cooked spaghetti taking its time to ooze down to the floor.
``Jesus man, I just wanted to help her...I went to meet her at the airport and everything. She's a religious freak, man. Never even drank soda before. I just wanted to help her see the outside world for a little bit. Just give her some new experiences, before her parents found out where she was and came up to get her.''
``Wait, you mean she's running away from home? What next, you going to tell me she fires AIDS out of her fingertips? That she has some sort of dick-snapping bear trap in her cunt? How more badly could you fuck this up?''
``It just doesn't pay to help people man...It just doesn't...'' I knew my only chance here was to shock him back into his senses, to wake him up by putting filthy, terrible ideas into his head.
``We've got to do SOMEthing with her before some fellow Jesus-freak finds her fucked and medicated body, and starts working her up into some gigantic Jesus-based rage. She'll make up stuff about us you didn't even think to do, and every juror and Court TV viewer in the nation will swallow it hook, line and sinker. They didn't need to know exactly what happened, they've SEEN freaks like us on their TVs before. We're evil, sinful, sodomous people who deserve to die in the most painful way possible. No simple hangings or lethal injections for us, no sir. We're going to SUFFER before we die. Thinks will probably start out with castration...''
He interrupted me with some unintelligible mumblings, but I knew I had him right where I wanted him. I continued. ``Fuck, we're already guilty, we might as well push it to the limit. They can't do anything more than kill us, right? Why don't we use this girl to enjoy our last days? Fuck her raw, then put some ears and a tail on her and let other congoers bang her for fifty bucks a go. Shit, if we make enough, maybe we can even get ourselves some hot-shit lawyer to bail us out. This is America, right? You can get away with murder if you have the right lawyer. Remember OJ?''
``Jesus man, you're SICK, you know that?'' I could tell that he was coming around, at least. My little charade had worked perfectly. ``Well shit, you're right though, we've gotta get rid of her. She's a liability man. And we need to do it fast, before she realizes what the fuck happened and who the fuck we are.'' He was right, of course. Our only chance was to cut her adrift and hope that her memory was fucked.
My assistant was somehow able to convince her that David Hopkins was in the overflow hotel waiting for her, and that he wanted to meet her personally. It took a little convincing to get her to agree to take all her things, including what little luggage she had and all of her artwork. Though it was only a short walk to the lobby, then a few blocks down to the con's overflow hotel, we took the longest, craziest, most zig-zagging path possible, then tossed her into a cab and gave the cabbie $20, with instructions to take the scenic route. He nodded and smiled, reaffirming my belief that in the modern era, only blacks and towelheads are suspicious. Us honkies are so goddamned crazy as it is that nothing we could ever ask for would ever seem out of the ordinary. What other race could have come up with a religious extremist like Tiny Tim, or a ADD/ADHD-addled ``comedian'' like Tom Green? Everyone else was just content to kill one another, so whitey had to step in and provide any craziness the Japanese hadn't gotten around to making yet.
The deed being done, we headed back to the room, and I was pleased to find that my bags and steak had arrived. In fact, they had done so awhile ago, as the steak was now only lukewarm. I dug in heartily anyway. Not because I felt obligated, having paid for it already, but because I had been honest when I said I was craving a steak. Cold or no, it was a fucking delicious thing. I'll never understand what is wrong with vegetarians. Do they really think that depriving themselves of the religious experience that is truly good steak that they will somehow live longer? What next, telling me not to rub my dick so much, because it's bad for my cholesterol-addled heart?
I needed to get down to that conference, which I was certain had already started at this point. I grabbed my untested, unproven technology and stuffed it into my pocket. Though I hadn't really paid for it, I certainly hoped that it worked at this point. Ivan, after all, was a Russian mob boss. He'd castrate me for sure if I didn't get this job right the first time.
You have to give furries credit for being incompetent at everything simultaneously, yet being too enthusiastic and good natured to let this incompetence stop them. Or even to slow them down. The room was much too small, and they had placed the speakers haphazardly. They were also too small, which amused me, considering the immense size of the speakers I'd seen them put up elsewhere. Was this all being done by the same group of people, or were there actually two groups of people competing for the same shitty job? Only in America.
People were clustered near the speakers, but the actual platform was at the head of the hall, with a tiny mic attempting to pick up the words. It was weird, to see everyone look forward, but focus their ears to the left, or right, or in whatever other direction those tiny speakers happened to be. There was also a bit of a delay, which resulted in some sort of strange, inverted echo, with the meager voice from the front arriving first, and the louder blasts arriving from the sides, ceiling and rear thereafter.
I didn't recognize the speaker, but I got a feeling this is what he lived for. I wondered if this was how he paid the bills. Was he carted from con to con, to thump the bible of anti-piracy, and make the fandom's elite feel a little better about the problem? Shit, what an awful job. I was glad I just spent all day touching Class 3 Infectious Agents with my bare hands.
``The biggest threat to this fandom is PIRACY, whether it be the stealing, tracing, or illegal distribution of our hardworking artists. Even something as innocuous as reposting a picture in a forum can result in taking money away from someone. Our enemy is imageboards, like fChan and WTFur, but as shutting one down will always result in another one popping up elsewhere, what we should focus on instead is prevention. We need to try and get into the mind of these pirates. Take this image, for example. As you can see, there is a picture from a paysite which has been edited illegally using a program known as `Photoshop.' For this reason, it is know as being `shooped,' as this is a popular misspelling of the word `shopped,' short for `photoshopped.'''
He was completely wrong, of course. True pirates cruise IRC channels, and rip from a lot more than just some $20/month paysites which updated once a week at best. True pirates are real nasty bastards, who buy things just for the purpose of scanning or, worse, steal them right off the con floor. They're not the sort who scan something they need to sell to pay the rent, or who download hi-res scans from portfolios they can't afford or are unable to buy due to it being out of print. They're mean, cruel, vicious bastards who get off on attention, whether it be the rush they get from giving porn to their fellow pirates, or the negative attention they get from those in authority. You can't empathize with them, they never feel sorry, and short of a bad case of sudden lead poisoning they are literally unstoppable.
My assistant had heard enough and made his way out, but I decided to stick around. He had trouble getting out, as the chairs were much too close together to let someone of his size pass by, and people had to stand up or get out of the aisle for him to leave. Shortly after he left, a short, poorly-made video about how piracy was run, and how you could spot a pirate walking around on the con floor. Except for the part about semen encrusted on the pants it was inaccurate and speculative at best, and as for semen stained pants, that describes about half the fandom right there. It would be more, but women don't secrete semen.
I would have laughed heartily at this campy, backwards, ``Reefer Madness''-esque madness had it not been for the couple sitting next to me. It wasn't the fact that they were large, it was the fact that they were...How shall I put it? Ill formed. As though in the process of creation, some force had gotten bored and quit, before scraping off the vast majority of excess clay. They were also going at it like bunnies in heat, excepting that their clothes stayed on. Flirting, kissing, touching, I think I even saw a little dry humping in there. The fact that they were doing this in an anti-piracy discussion demonstrated everything that was wrong with this fandom, as determined by my own reasoning. Piracy was a problem, yes, but the real problem is that every one of us was a social retard with a libido that would make a pornstar recoil in horror. We were filthy, dirty, shameless people, that longed only to be in a group too big for anyone to fuck with.
I needed to get out of there, so I began to act sick, and make talk like I was about to throw up. People won't get out of your way to be polite, but they will very much get out of your way if they think you might be giving them a big helping of your corn-in-orange-sauce stew.
When I headed out, I saw that my assistant had plopped himself down with an anti-piracy advocate. He wasn't wearing a shirt or anything, but that sort of stand-up-straight, be proud of yourself posture could only mean he was in total agreement with what was happening around him. I wondered why he was next to the herd, instead of in the thick of it. Oh well, my job as a predator to wipe out the stragglers.
I sat down, sandwiching the poor bastard between me and my assistant. I had no idea if he was on to my plan, or if he'd even pick up on it, so I decided to spearhead the charge entirely on my own. ``So, you're here to help the global war on piracy, hmm?''
``Yeah, I am. I'm a member of a little group, not more than eight of us, but we're growing. Based out of the LAFF area. We're doing everything we can to stop pirates, we've got to, it's a necessity for the artists.
``Me and my assistant Dr. Friday here are from another group out in the far west, a little place in sunny CA. Real crazy fucks doing some piracy down there, if you wanna hear about it.'' I could tell by the way he put his elbows on the table that he was just one eager beaver for this bullshit. Time to feed him the biggest, craziest lie I could come with and let him make the spit or swallow. This is the moment us storytellers live for, the nervous, tense moment where you don't know if they're going to catch you in your lie. Or worse, they'll end up believing you, but be bored. Shit, at that point, things would be better if they just shot you in the face.
``He moved in with a local artist, who's name I will not state. Legal reasons, you see. Anyway, the guy just parks his computer, scanner, and tremendously fat ass in the girl's apartment and starts to scan and upload everything in her apartment he can get his hands on. Guy wears no shirt, and only gets up to eat and shit and get more art for like a week. She tries to get him to leave, but he threatens her with a knife, and in any event he's just so HUGE she doesn't know how to mess with him. When her fridge is depleted and he's got everything she's ever drawn up on the Chan boards, he walks out to his car and vanishes like nothing. We still don't know who the fucker is, but we've got some leads. Some sort of ex-military maniac who got handed a Section 8 for just not bein' anywhere near right in the head. Anyways we're tracking him now, in fact, we intended to see him at this con. We want shit we can hand over to the police, get the guy arrested, or on a restraining order or something. The bastard just needs to be stopped.''
My audience listened, nodded his head, then calmly sat back in his chair a little. He had that dazed, surprised look on his face that let me know he'd bought it, and I did my best to bask in the good feelings without breaking my cool. ``Jesus...'' he said. ``Man, I knew some of these pirates were crazy, but...A giant, fat man holding me hostage in my own house? Shit, what is WRONG with this fandom, people doing stuff like that?'' He was shaking his head and my assistant was looking on, unsure if he should point out that I was a goddamn liar or if he should join in the fun. I got up and encouraged him to follow me, denying him the chance.
I needed a break from this bad craziness. We had no cash, no respect, and as I was soon to find out, no audio to hand over to Ivan (universally compatible my ass. At least we could snail-mail him some leaflets we picked up off the floor on the way out). There was only one place for us to go at this point: the con suite. We sure as hell didn't want to go, but when it's late at night and you haven't got a drop of cash, its your only option.
A con suite is where you go when you've fucked up one too many times in the con proper. When you burned up your last $20 bill on some portfolio featuring a heavily tattooed sled dog with a tongue piercing. It's a place where you can feed yourself and hang out with your fellow losers at rock bottom. Of course, at this point in time, it was so late, we were the only losers there.
The place had closed, but the woman on duty had agreed to let us stay and finish our food provided we were quiet. The microwaveable Mexican food we'd served ourselves was barely edible, but we nibbled at it, wanting more a place to crash than something to eat. My assistant had enough blubber stored up for years to come, and I was certain I had eaten something quite filling some time earlier. I remember it being meaty and delicious, but without my notes that's as far as it went.
The woman in charge of the con suite had the burnt-out, skeletal look of a woman who was at one time very pretty, but has since had her appearance sanded off by the cruel hardness of life. She cleaned things up idly as we sat on the floor and ate from plastic plates. She was very much in charge here, but it was a desperate sort of leadership. Like the queen of some tiny Asian nation being overrun by American forces, she could only maintain her dignity and a few tiny shreds of power. She was a person of authority, horrified by her own inevitable and impending impotence.
This being the case, I knew that in our exhausted and addled state, my assistant would soon bring our peace to a violent end. Our drugs had, for all practical purposes, run out at this point. The tussin was gone, as was the Ritalin, and while we still had plenty of caffeine, the inhalers, pills, powders and Jolt had all be used or lost. What remained was too dilute for our minds and bodies, which had been running for almost eighty straight hours at this point. What we needed was amphetamines, as we were reaching the point of exhaustion when the hallucinations become real.
My assistant picked up a napkin off the floor and began dragging a pen across it, until the Mistress of the Con Suite came within arm's reach. He handed it to her, calm as could be, then resumed to shoving a chimichanga in his mouth. I watched closely as she opened the disgusted little piece of paper, then turned around to face us, her face filled with rage.
``What the fuck is this?'' she asked us. She presented the paper. Among the random doodles and scribbles was a single phrase:
``GREAT GOBBY GRANDMA TITS!''
The exclamation point was emphasized, and I could crudely make out a large breasted but obviously elderly bear giving some floating penis a titjob. Did my assistant really think this crude come-on could bring anything but trouble?
``I've taken a lot of shit at this con, but I don't have to take it off some FATASS who'd rather shove microwaved shit into his mouth than bother to get a fucking girlfriend! Why don't you get out of here before I radio Kage and have him ban your fucking ass from Anthrocontm?
My assistant got to his feet, his speed surprising me, though his face remained calm. ``Call in to Kage and the other thugs? Let me help.'' His hand shot out and snatched the radio from her waist, then flung it, hard, in the direction of the bathroom. The tiny device struck marble, a substance for which was more than a match for its plastic exterior. It shattered into a million pieces, which blasted and zinged their way around the bathroom like some sort of bizarre electronics confetti. It can't have lasted more than a few seconds, but in my state of being, it appeared to last for minutes, or even hours.
My assistant then moved to the impromptu kitchen, picking up a small cake which had, somehow, gone uneaten. Maybe she was saving it for someone? He held it up high, like the way a waiter does a tray, or the way an Italian stereotype gives dinner, preparing to single-handedly bring it down from the dark air above a candle-lit table, as if making pasta and bread magically appear in front of you. ``How much for this?''
``Not for sale.'' She said. She was trying to maintain her grip on power, though the murder of that radio had clearly shaken her.
``What, five? Ten? Fifteen?'' I noticed him pull a small wad of cash from his pocket and then begin to roll it out. Where had he gotten that? And why hadn't he shared with me? I was using that bum credit card an awful lot at this point. The more I purchased, the greater a chance they'd trace it back to me. How much longer could I maintain?
``Let's call it twenty and I'll be on my way.'' He shoved $20 in fives into her hand, then began to slowly move towards the door, expecting me to follow. I did so, if for no other reason than that I feared for my life. On my way out, I could clearly see that the Mistress was crying. That moment of anger and violence had stirred dark, unpleasant memories in her tired psyche. One look and you knew that she too had been smashed, like a beer bottle with a bullet gone through it.
In our diseased state, driving around our fancy big convertible seemed like the only logical course of action. I must truly wonder how messed up we were: I hate cars, and in any event I had rented this one with fake ID and a false credit card. Did I truly think I could get away with flashing this thing around? It was, for all intensive purposes, stolen by this point. But back on to the subject of cars: why is it that I, an admittedly poor driver, seem to know more about how to operate these machines than everyone else on the road? Have I, through some cosmic prank, just been surrounded by idiots since I was 16? And if so, why? Why did everyone always need to turn in the same place at the same time I did, only without signaling? Why did everyone other than me drive while talking on their cell phone? Clearly, I am missing out on some greater truth here. I'm out of the loop one everything, it seems.
Our wandered around, slow and exhausted, much like ourselves. We had almost a completely full tank, and therefore simply kept moving, sliding around this big, nasty city that desperately wanted us to go away so it could sleep. I believe the only reason we weren't shot is the innate politeness of your man on the street. You can't expect him to be considerate, smart, or well-groomed, but you can always expect him to be polite with rude people. Never with anyone else, though.
At some point, we pulled up alongside some station wagon (were they still making those at that time?) that was tooling around the convention area. It was obviously filled with furs, as indicated by the paraphernalia in the back. I presume they were getting a head-start on the mass exodus that would be occurring later that day (I presume it was Sunday by this point), but we never bothered to find out.
They were driving along amazingly slow and I, for some reason, felt compelled to keep exact pace beside them. I must have been hypnotized by something I saw inside. I have a compulsion to take a good, close look at things sometimes. My assistant was leaning his head out the side of our convertible, probably puking onto the nice white paint. At some point he decided to start talking to these poor fucks, working to dig the ditch we'd be buried in.
``Hey FURFAGS! Wanna get some cheap porn? I got everything you could ever want, man...'' He reached around in the back where he was sitting and pulled out a handful of poorly-printed, heavily wrinkled pics he'd yanked off the internet. I think they were from Sexyfur, which was ballsy even for a drunk, tired bastard like him. Bernal would sue his own mom if he had half a chance. My assistant just laughed, waving the porn around, not seeming to notice or care that some of it was getting blown out onto the street. ``I just got back from Iraq!''
He continued this insanity for awhile, until suddenly one of the sleepy passengers had enough. The man pressed his face against the glass, shouting what I presume were threats and obscenities. They fell on deaf ears, of course: what with the car, wind, noise, and glass window between us, nothing came through.
Having had enough, we made our way back to the hotel. I had no idea what time it was, but of course there was a valet ready to park the Great White, and the hotel was running perfectly normally. There's a creepy consistency in the way that things like hotels, convenience stores and other 24/7 places never turn off, or even slow down. Are we really moving to a time in which day and night are no longer relevant? Has it all come down to billable hours?
I collapsed on the bed in the room, ready for a long, deep, powerful sleep. But my assistant, propelled by madness, exhaustion, and god-knows what all else, was compelled to fiddle with his computer. He had gotten some little shitty printer from some place and was busy printing out something. When he finished, he held it up to me, some sort of sinister, copypaper giftiger apfel.
``What the fuck is this, man?''
``The craziest shit you'll ever see, man.'' I took the improvised magazine lightly, regarding it with apprehension. I didn't even need to see it to tell it was dangerous. Unfortunately, I was curious about exactly how dangerous it was.
``Where...Did you get it?''
``Sibe just e-mailed it to me. He says its thanks for getting his PC to work. I know he's a pirate and a goddamn thief and all, but even the lowliest fuck deserves to get on the internet, you know what I mean man? Shit, that's where they BELONG. Besides I was afraid to turn the fucker down. That son a bitch is totally fucked in the head, man. Probably cut my nuts off and eat them. Just for the hell of it.''
I idly began to browse through the poorly printed and horribly scanned magazine. In retrospect, I should have appreciated this devastating lack of quality. There were things on those pages that no man should ever see, much less in my state of mind. There were...things...Indescribable things, that I wouldn't even choose to describe, were I able to remember precisely what they were. These images were ripped right from the insane, sexual horrors that are my worst nightmares. And yet, I couldn't stop turning the pages.
``Don't read it so fast, man. You'll start to lose it. Things `ll go wrong with your head and your dick, man.'' Things were already going wrong. When you've stayed awake for three days, your mind starts to have trouble separating the real and the imagined, and as I continued to read those awful pages, the images I saw were leaving the page and manifesting themselves around me. Multidicked herms with penis nipples that shot excrement were raping and sodomizing one another in front of me. I could feel them pulling and tugging at me, demanding that I be sucked into the ``fun.'' My mind recoiled in horror as my assistant's head ceased to be connected to its body, the stump being fucked hard by a herm who's dick was so incredibly long it came out of his asshole, only to be fellated by my assistant's now free-floating head. ``You're losing it, man. You've read too much...Read too much...''
The world around me was turning into a nightmare that would send even Doug Winger running for cover. Dicks, tits, asses, piss, shit, blood, semen...Bodily parts and fluids were making a horrible living decoupage in front of me. It all moved. It all had depth. It even stank, a stench which no experience I have ever had before, or will hopefully have since, could ever match.
At this point, both my mind and my notes cease to be coherent, and I must attempt to piece together what happened from available evidence discovered after the fact. This worries me, considering I am one who is haunted by his memories, often having intense attacks of fear, guilt or despair from events which occurred decades ago, and were possibly even insignificant then. My one true fear now is that some of these events will pan out to be true, and that they will come rushing back to me in a waking nightmare of regret and horror.
That being said, here are the events, near as I can piece them together. Note that there is no order to these, as even their occurrence, much less their order, is very much in question:
Encountered a person presumed female, but who turned out to be very male, then proceeded to fuck them anyway.
Attempted to gain entry to a private artist's party, despite not being invited, or capable of drawing.
Hit on a person whom I despise, and who shall not be named.
Attempted to play DDR, then vomited on the machine.
Encountered ex in elevator, then stood perfectly still for a very uncomfortable ten floors, saying nothing until fleeing out into the lobby shouting ``FATTY!''
Went through lobby wearing nothing below the waist.
Attempted to go swimming in a fursuit I did not own, and had to be rescued from drowning once suit filled with water and carried me to the bottom of the pool.
Entered the Babyfur room and was struck in the face by a used adult diaper, presumably during/after an argument.
Threatened to beat up at least five people, succeeded in beating up at least one person.
Made an artist cry.
Got the GOH to sign an unused but also unwrapped condom.
Attacked ``peasants'' with a ``spork of vengance.''
``Debated'' with a Nazi fur (may have something to do with the incident involving beating up someone).
Broke the little toe in my left foot.
Ruined a little girl's dreams, and possibly childhood, forever.
Insulted all the wrong people.
Had my own childhood raped.
Had people I do not know draw pictures in a book I refuse to look at and hope I didn't pay for.
Convinced someone to buy me a drink.
Got something pierced.
Accepted hugs from a man wearing a T-shirt saying ``Free Hugs!'' then lived to tell about it.
Convinced an entire room of people that I was smart, funny, and well-mannered, despite being none of these.
Ate a one-pound hamburger in a single sitting, to a cheering audience.
Convinced someone I'd never met before that he owed me money, and then collected it.
Told an entire crowd that I hated Seinfeld and Family Guy and nothing they could ever do could make me like such poorly written drivel.
Somehow, amazingly, made it back to my room in this state, and fell asleep.
I'd like to take a pause from the narration here and insert a scene which I know occurred, but which I cannot place with any certainty. For all I know, it did indeed occur during this period of lost time. However, it could have just as easily occurred during any one of the other strange, wakeless mornings experienced at the con.
I am unsure if I awoke, or was simply stirred to action. The room was dark, as the lights were off and the shades were up, but enough daylight crept through to let me see what was going on. My assistant was trying to smother someone with a medical donut. I found this to be very odd, as I knew my assistant did not use one. Someone, somewhere at this con was now unable to sit down.
``Who the fuck sent you here? Tell me everything you no!'' My assistant was barking out orders as he sat and pushed, and whoever was down there was putting up quite a fight. I opened the curtains to let in some light, and was able to tell that, somehow, he'd managed to overpower and pin down the maid. Shit, I'd forgotten to hang out that do-not-disturb sign the night before. ``How much are they paying you?''
``What pedophiles? I know nothing!''
``You fucking LYING CUNT!'' As he continued to assault her with the rubber ring, she spewed out a line of curses in Spanish, none of which I can spell but many I have since learned to pronounce properly. I needed to act fast, before things got a chance to really go wrong here.
``Wait a minute! Maybe she's telling the truth. Maybe she doesn't know anything.'' I have to give my assistant credit where credit is due: he is very good at catching on to my little performances, and is very eager to play the part. Past experience has taught him that this usually gets him out of trouble or, at the very least, gives him a chance to get away while I'm force-feeding my audience a steaming pile of the brown stuff. ``Maybe she doesn't know anything about the pedophile ring.''
My assistant backed off a little, and the maid quickly extracted herself from beneath him. She seemed to have a flash of realization now: much like my assistant, there was a role for her to play, and I was her maestro. All she had to do was play along, and everything would be fine. ``I don't know anything about no pedophiles! I HATE pedophiles!''
``Maybe she's telling the truth.'' I said. ``Maybe she hates chimos as much as we do.''
``Chimos?'' she asked.
``Child molesters. Big, hairy, nasty old men who try to rape little boys and girls they meet over the internet. That's what we're here for. To catch `em. You see, this is just one big trap for the bastards. That's why we've been leaving the sign out. We don't want this place to be disturbed, it's a crime scene.'' I turned to my assistant and bit down on my pen, whispering loudly into his ear. ``She knows too much. We can't let her go free, but we can't silence her either. I say we put her on the payroll.''
``The payroll?'' my assistant said. Whether or not he was intending to, he was playing the part very well here.
``Yeah, just like the concierge, the porters, and those guys who wash the dishes. Fuck, this woman is invaluable, she's got to know these rooms inside and out.'' I turned to her, and gave her my biggest Cockmongler smile. ``How would you like to make an extra $5000 a month?''
I could see by her response that I had picked an appropriately outrageous number. ``Five thousand dollars?'' She sounded out each syllable, as if waiting for me to correct her. ``I'd do ANYTHING for that!''
``Well I won't ask you to do anything, but what I will ask is that you wait for an agent Grinman to contact you. He'll be wearing a lab coat and glasses, but don't worry about recognizing him, he'll recognize you. When he comes up to you and says `itty bitty baby' you reply with `itty bitty boat.' Then he will reply with `I don't believe it' and you will state the password `habeeb it.' Do you understand?'' She nodded, and I decided to take things to the limit.
``Let's practice, then. Itty bitty baby!''
``Itty bitty boat...'' she stammered. Clearly, she was confused by this password, and blind as to its origin.
``I don't believe it!''
``Habeeb it?''
``No, not as a question, say it loud, proud! Agent Grinman is a little hard of hearing, you may have to shout.
``HABEEB IT!'' I needed to end it now, before I or my assistant started laughing.
``TWINKIE HOUSE! That's his last reply, the one he'll use to let you know it's all clear. When he says that, just tell him everything you know, everything you've seen. Don't worry if it doesn't make any sense, that's our problem, not yours. Oh and every midnight, leave a pile of towels and a newspaper out by the door. That way we won't have any more little problems like this, eh?'' I quickly shuttled her out into the hallway, before she could do any more damage. My assistant immediately collapsed, laughing uncontrollably.
``Shit man, you're crazy.'' I smiled. It was the good kind of crazy.
I found myself in bed, covered in various bits of non-human waste, garbage, and artifacts from some sort of continual bout of madness. I must have fallen asleep, at some time, in some way, though I don't remember doing so. I checked my watch. 11 AM on a Sunday. Shit, we had a noon checkout. Or did we? Just how long had reservations been set? I moved to the window and opened the blinds, trying to throw some daylight on all this insanity.
All around me was an impenetrable muck of wrappers, empty room service flatware, magazines, and just downright garbage. The smell was indescribable, but the sickly sweet of sugar, along with the salty foul of human sweat, seemed to be the most prominent. My assistant was in there somewhere, but in the mix of dirty linens and discarded clothing, he was as well camouflaged as a nun in a coal factory.
What had caused this madness? Could mere drugs and nerdiness explain this mess? There was evidence of every dangerous proscription drug on the market since 1995. What had gone on here? And more importantly, how could we get away with it?
I knew that the first thing we needed to do was get the hell out of this hotel room. I quickly started grabbing things and stuffing them into whatever I could find. Ignore the wrinkles, the crushing, the cracking, you just need to get this stuff out of here, and fast. My assistant eventually noticed my movements and, extracting himself from a mess of printed pages, lumbered towards the shower to wash his gigantic, naked rear end.
I called down to the front desk and told them to send up porters, who arrived with amazing speed. Had they been waiting in the hall, expecting us to make a mad dash for it? No chance to turn back now. We had to go. The only way out of this trap was right through the middle of it.
We had violated every rule the fandom lived by. We'd pirated art. Insulted the artists. Abused the respect and patience of those who were, at least superficially, in charge here. We had but one chance now: that we'd committed so many wrongs in so little time, that anyone in any position of authority would have no idea what to do with us.
Eventually, I managed to pile myself and my things into the Great White. I began to pound the horn impatiently, enjoying the intensely loud and obnoxious sound it made. Where the fuck was my assistant? Didn't he understand we had just this one chance to escape? After what seemed like an eternity, I saw him come, half clothed, charging out of the elevator and towards the car. He almost bowled over a fursuiter on his way towards me, something prevented only by the quick movement and thinking of a nearby handler. My assistant was frantically waving some sheet of paper, the meaning of which I couldn't hope to make out.
``Shit, we've got to go, I'm gonna miss my flight!'' he said.
``What?''
``My one way ticket. I've got a one way ticket here, taking me all the way back to Quebec.''
``Shit, there's no way we can make it back to Madison in time for your damned plane. Why didn't you tell me earlier?''
``No no no, see, this ticket is for Pittsburgh. Noon sharp flight. You gotta get me to the airport, man!''
``Shit, we've got thirty minutes to get to an airport that's an hour away, AND you were supposed to be there fifteen minutes ago.'' He began to kick my leg wildly, as if he hoped to somehow jar me into slamming down the gas pedal.
``Maybe it's fucking late, who the hell cares? We just need to GO.''
``Well I've never missed a plane, and now would be an awful time to start.'' I slammed it to the floor, taking full advantage of the automatic transmission. The car had a ride like an aircraft carrier sailing through mashed potatoes, but there was no time to fix it with overinflated tires right now. I had a plane to catch.
After running several red lights, I was forced to stop for one by pedestrians. As I watched them cross, I noticed something odd about the straggler. She was dragging luggage along with her, but she had a sheaf of papers under her arm, all of which seemed to be oversized, intense portraits of Farrago from JACK. Realizing what I'd just run in to, I shoved the car into reverse, and executed the first K-turn I'd used since my driving test.
``We're going the wrong way!'' complained my assistant.
``The fuck we are!'' I said, as I tooled through inner city streets at almost 100 mph. At the very least, I thought, anyone attempting to conduct a driveby would have little chance of hitting us. We were about as stationary as a squirrel on cocaine.
Despite my dislike of driving, I'm supposedly rather good at it, and seeing as I was able to maintain these dangerous speeds in heavy traffic without causing an accident, or even getting caught, I'd venture to say that this is reasonably correct. The Great White wove through traffic like a ship through the levels of Gradius, resulting in more than a few close scrapes, and a number of screeching halts and dodges by my fellow motorists. As I drove I smashed into the horn, thus further complicating the mystery of why I was not arrested, or even pulled over. I guess there is some point of madness where you've gone so far, you go back to the top of the circle, and instead of condemnation, all anyone can say is ``Good job!''
``Get the fuck out of the way!'' I said as I veered into the oncoming lane to get around a slow moving minivan. ``I've got a fucking plane to catch!'' I could see the runway off to my right, and I was tempted to simply jump off the road and make a try for it, smashing through gates and security fences and pulling up to the first plane I saw. But I didn't know the gate number of my assistant's plane, and we didn't have TIME for that sort of nonsense. Plus, what if they made me explain things? I'd been pushing my luck up to this point. Exactly how many times could I lie to a cop before they caught on to me? There had to be some sort of Cop Collective, some Overmind or Borg Queen in charge of this whole operation. I couldn't let her on to my plans, else the entire goddamn planet would be doomed.
The car came to a screeching, almost thudding, halt in the white zone. I had to get my assistant out of there fast. If I wasn't loading or unloading, they'd fucking get me. I kicked at him madly with my pedal foot as I shifted into park, my other leg holding down the brake. ``Get out of the damn car, you fucking fat fuck!''
Despite my anger, he got out of the car with a smile on his face and relative ease, helping himself to one suitcase from the back seat, leaving everything else with me. Thanks, you magnificent bastard, leaving me with all the evidence. He turned to face me before heading out to the airport doors. ``Anything to say before I disappear into the great god-awful north?''
``Just that you can always send an e-mail to the right people, if you ever need help, if you ever need a place to stay.'' He chuckled lightly, then stood up straight.
``Heh. Good advice, if you're stupid.'' He then grabbed his bag and ambled off to the revolving door.
``There he goes...'' I thought. ``One of God's own failures. A living testament to Jehovah's fallibility. Too wrong to live, too right to die.
After getting out of the airport, I hunted around for awhile until I found a place to sit and collect my thoughts. There's a point of weirdness where you are simply so bizarre that no one can see you, their minds simply can't process the absurdity of the situation. However, the human mind can quickly become numb to any source of stimulation, no matter how powerful. As such, you can only push the insanity for so long before people start to notice. And you never know when people will suddenly be able to see you, horrified at the awfulness of your presence.
I pulled into a ``Scenic View'' turnoff and parked my car, unsure of what to do next. I could ditch the car and its contents in some airport parking lot, and very suspiciously purchase a one-way ticket with no bags to be checked, or I could attempt to drive home with shit that would give any highway patrolman conniptions. The latter seemed my only reasonable alternative, since I've grown to despise air travel. Seeing as airline execs always ride in private jets as opposed to using their own goddamn service, I have no reason to trust the quality of their planes. If they're so good, why the fuck don't YOU ride in them? Shit, packed into a flying tin can with no food, half a glass of flat soda, eight screaming children and a woman so fat she takes up two seats? No wonder the airline industry keeps getting bailed out by the feds.
The New Hope for America: Had I found it? When you get down to it, all I'd really done was make a nuisance of myself, and commit several acts of fraud. Nothing Enron-level either, which means they might actually prosecute me. Shit, I couldn't go to jail. With an ass like mine, I'd be passed around and raped every moment of the day. And they wouldn't even give me the reach around, those bastards. No wonder they were in jail, with behavior like that.
I was beginning to think there was no New Hope for America, that it was just some sort of madness that the GOP had come up with to try and sway some votes, by convincing them that something might actually be done about our horrible situation. When you got down to it, that's the sort of fallacy that the entire Fur Fandom has fallen into: the belief that someone, somewhere, is in charge here.
I got out of my car, realizing that the sunset was now approaching, and opened my trunk just to see what all sorts of things were in there. Deep down in the muck and madness left over from three-and-some days at a fur con, I noticed a familiar smatter of colors poking out at me. After tugging and yanking, I managed to extract a rather large, practically new American flag from the mess. Shit, where did this come from? Did I steal it off the flagpole in front of the hotel? What was the penalty for flag stealing these days? Was it taken near as seriously as flag burning?
There were plenty of routes back to Wisconsin, but only one I intended to take: an insanely long, brain-burning fourteen-plus hour drive though one hick town after another. Avoid as much of the Great United States of Generica as possible by avoiding stops, excepting for gas, shitting and eating. That I would do almost simultaneously at various dingy twenty-four-hour convenience stores, praying to nonexistent deities that whoever intended to rob the store would be polite enough to wait until after I'd pulled away from the pump.
Knowing I'd be speeding like hell just to try and get back home before Monday called me back to my shitty, disease-infested workspace, I decided to jam the retracting roof into a position about a foot or so out of its compartment, then attach the flag to it. Highway cops are, after all, extremely fucking patriotic. They would obviously be able to tell that only a True Patriot, on a mission from God and Country, would be zipping through America's back roads with a stolen Hotel flag attached to the hood of his rental vehicle. As I've said before, there's a point where you're so goddamn crazy that they don't know what to do with you, and leave you alone, rather than start to figure out what the hell it is you're doing exactly.
I floored it pulling out of the stop, as if I somehow intended to catch up with the sun in the distance. The car, a magnificent example of American engineering, leapt up at what would probably be its only chance to truly show what it was capable of. Every pony under the hood thundered its hooves as I turned 36 million-year-old plant waste into toxic dust. I rode, like some sort of crazy Helios, charging towards the sun instead of dragging it behind me, my speed unimpeded by traffic, cops, or speed limits.
I could feel all the madness of this crazy trip, and possibly even the fandom, peel off and leave itself in the dust behind me. There was an overwhelming feeling of purity, of freedom, of having extracted myself from the worst of all possible worlds. Somehow, I'd extracted myself wholesale from this mad fandom and emerged unscathed, like a baby c-sectioned out of some crack-smoking half-dead AIDS-filled prostitute, miraculously free of addictions and disease. Something deep down told me that it's all right now. In fact, it's a gas.
