ACHTUNG!
This product contains elements of dirtiness. Pregnant women, Presbyterians, and those easily persuaded to climb inside of coin-operated tumble dryers should not ride this ride.

Collins Mini English Dictionary defines the following words as such:
Porno/n., adj./Informal/short for PORNOGRAPHY or PORNOGRAPHIC.
Safari/n./expedition to hunt or observe wild animals.
Sausage/n./minced meat in an edible tube-shaped skin.
Sausages/n./many minced meat in an edible tube-shaped skin dealies.

There are many things in this life that cannot be helped or explained. Slappy Mutt Mutt found it difficult to swallow, but had spent a great deal of time considering the options and could come up with no other explanation. Slappy Mutt Mutt had spent years pondering it. What made it so confusing was all the alarmingly apparent exceptions.

1) Most things look pretty real.
2) Nuclear winter does not entitle you to a “second annual Christmas.�
3) All things are comprised of protons, electrons, and neutrons which are, themselves, comprised of even smaller measurements of ridiculousness.
4) Ice cream will always melt on hot days.
5) Girls with big tits tend to have larger cabooses than girls with small tits.
6) X-ray vision glasses that are sold in comic books do not really work.
7) It is impossible to accurately calculate the trajectory of dinner rolls. (Especially in Hamburg, Turin, and Chelmsford—for some reason).

That said, Slappy Mutt Mutt had long since realized that most of life’s constants were, on closer inspection, unpredictable. No matter what you might need to believe as being the way it is, nothing in this universe is definite. And that brings us to the whole kidnapping thing.

I’ll be the first to admit that Slappy shouldn’t have kidnapped the girl. But, if you really stop and think about it, he had no idea that he was going to do it. And there was little that I could have done to prevent it. I only went along because I was unconscious when the board was in session. I awoke to discover myself stuck in the middle of the Mojave Desert with a girl locked up in a cage.

If you are the sort of person who is easily disagreeable, I would suggest that you stop right here. This is not for you. To be honest, this is the kind of thing satanic high priests would find disagreeable. My mother was a dancer in a house of burlesque and she would not be pleased (to say the least). I was kind of intrigued by the whole thing. As vile as it might seem now, at the time it looked better than a banana split the size of Ojos del Salado.

Slappy had always been a bit of a reactionary. He was the kind of guy that wouldn’t say anything about babies being killed, but kill one right in front of him and you’d never hear the end of it. Wholly mesmerized by an ill-formed compassionate teaching that is entirely based on unreasonable proximity. If you had to deal with the fact that there were children eating leftovers out of your garbage cans you would probably feel guilty. Guilty enough to be brought to action perhaps. Maybe you’d feed them. Maybe you’d just hack them into little pieces and toss them in your compost. Most North Americans have become quite desensitized to homelessness, for example. This is largely due to the fact that the homeless are so damn smelly and grubby lookin’. Therefore, proximity no longer has anything to do with it. Most North Americans tend to view crazy people who talk to themselves on the street as, well…crazy people who talk to themselves on the street, I would think. Schizophrenics, on the other hand, might argue that their illness is comparable to living one’s life with their head stuck in a toilet that is constantly being flushed.

Most folks would not stop long enough to think about it. Most folks just wish such bothersome individuals would melt into the endlessness that is our great and desirable social landscape. Being that they are products of that landscape, the question remains: where exactly should they be sent? For if they are not to remain here, with us, then perhaps we are all destined for unceremonious exile. Having said that, know then that what occurred during those lost hours in the desert could be best defined as an experiment of sorts. It was an experiment to see what might occur if all the so-called sane people of this world decided to take the day off and just the crazies were left to mind the till.

Slappy Mutt Mutt had not always been a bad man. Like most people, he was once filled with emotions and thoughts of a pleasant nature. But things change, quite often for the worse to be honest. He had once been a good man. I did not know him then. I only knew the demonic Slappy who was, without a doubt, far more entertaining than his former angelic self. I’m sure.

So there we were, five of us all told. The girl, who made six, doesn’t count. She was safely locked within the confines of the cage called the love-hold trap, bound and gagged. That left Slappy, myself, Ernesto Valencias (the famous Honduran trapeze artist known for lighting himself on fire), Dr. Maurice, and Mr. Chips. The doctor was a rather peculiar sort of fellow. He couldn’t have been an inch taller than 5’1’’, with a huge bushel of curly blond hair atop his head. He was a motivational speaker. During our foray into the wilds he did a lot of talking but failed to motivate anyone besides our captive.

There’s history behind everything. The history behind our trek into the Mojave goes a little something like this…

It was a hot, dusty afternoon when I stumbled into town. People were sitting on their porches and waiting for the night to provide them with an excuse to be productive. Nighttime in the desert is funny like that. Much colder than most realize, the drastic difference between the two twelve o’clock markers is quite severe. Deadly heat during the day and vicious cold at night. Perfect for lizards and, for some unknown reason, elderly asthmatic Canadian golfers.

Slappy Mutt Mutt was born in the desert. He was raised in the desert, went to school in the desert, went to war in the jungle and returned to the desert, and (finally) opened an adult books and paraphernalia boutique in the desert. Besides the one year that Slappy spent in the jungle, he had lived his entire life in the desert. You know, I’m not quite sure what it is, but there’s something about the desert that tends to blur the lines of social acceptability, like Las Vegas.

When Slappy was just a kid he used to live on the outskirts of town. His mother, Janice, worked in a roadhouse called the Three Suns. And although Slappy was under the impression that she spent her time at the Three Suns serving drinks to thirsty desperadoes, she was actually the one doing all the drinking. Janice was one of those rare prostitute-waitresses that rarely seems to have time to do either job properly. Either you get an unopened bottle of beer or half a yank. The woman couldn’t concentrate. Years later, Janice would discover that she suffered from ADD. She would learn that she was dyslexic as well. And, as ridiculous as it might sound, once she chose to acknowledge and tackle these ailments, she was forced to come to terms with the fact that she had an IQ of one hundred and ninety-six. She was forty-seven at the time. She died two years later driving to Washington, where she had landed a job in one of those highly mysterious think tanks where people sit around all day and debate the pros and cons of things such as thermonuclear war. She accidentally drove her car into the back of a semi trailer parked on the side of the highway. She was doing ninety. She was putting on eyeliner. She looked great at the time.

But this wasn’t the first time. Slappy was traumatized twice before the age of ten. The first time was when his father fell off the roof of the house while attempting to set up a Christmas scene after consuming a bottle of Wild Turkey. He fell and landed head first on the driveway. He was killed instantly. Two weeks later, Slappy’s grandmother was shot to death by the milkman. From what I can gather the woman was quite unpleasant to most folks. After years of taking her shit, the milkman decided that he’d had enough. So he shot her nine times. The glorious bastard stood there and took the time to reload.

Coupled with spending a year in Vietnam, it was only a matter of time before Slappy cracked a bolt. He had spent the better part of twenty years living a life of mediocre filthiness in a town where people were too lazy to be bothered with the exotic entanglements of licorice whips, edible underwear, and love harnesses. Slappy’s skull was just waiting for something ingenious to discover its dark, empty places. As it turned out, everything fell into place just as I strolled into town with an empty gas can. I would leave town two days later in the company of a would-be kidnapper and his faithful entourage. I would never see the gas can again.

It may sound almost too typical to be believable, but the truth of the matter is that I did indeed run out of gas in the middle of the desert. I had not planned it that way. I felt as if I had landed squarely in the first ten minutes of some disgustingly brilliant hacker film. It left me with little choice but to rummage around in the trunk for a gas can that at the time I could have sworn was bigger and head off in a direction best suited to the illusions of a hopeful outcome.

You won’t find the town of Slappy’s birth on any map. It’s far too small for such recognition. Which must bring one to wonder why anyone in their right mind would open a XXX boutique in such a place. Slappy would later confess that he did it as an experiment in futility. I responded to that statement by walking into a wall three times in a row. The difference? Mine took under a minute. His took twenty years. It makes no sense.
I found myself in a one-road town filled with an odd variety of introverts, extroverts, mindless shapes, and the cackling ghosts of ill confidence. A town that had been frozen in the forgotten arms of the 1950s. Slappy, unlike many of his fellow citizens, had left that little town for a brief time. He went from that place into the mysterious East where he shot at nothing and hid from everything. He returned to his desert time capsule and shut himself off. And that’s where I come into it. He hit me with his pick-up, so there was little I could do about it.

It still boggles my mind to this day. How exactly does one get hit by a vehicle in a town with only one road? In a town where, even if the entire population owned a car, there wouldn’t be enough traffic to warrant a traffic light. At the time I chose to blame Slappy’s driving instead of my own foolish disregard. I stepped off the curb just as Slappy was turning the corner. I froze, he slammed on the brakes, and I was introduced to the outstanding arguments to the contrary pertaining to the existence of most things.

When I awoke I found myself in a saloon. It was rather empty as saloons go. That came as no great surprise mind you. According to several locals that I would speak to later that day, the town theatre had been showing Logan’s Run their entire lives and none of them had ever seen it.

Semi-conscious in a saloon with five strangers. I would end up with four of them in the Mojave Desert with the fifth locked up in a cage, bound and gagged. They were, as stated earlier, Slappy Mutt Mutt, Ernesto Valencias, Dr. Maurice, and Mr. Chips. As my eyes opened, it was their faces that hovered above me like four angelic frauds. For there was but one angel in the room. And her name was Rosemary.

Now, it was easy to deduce that Slappy was in charge from the get-go. No one said or did anything without his strange, unconscious say-so. Everyone, that is, but Mr. Chips. Mr. Chips did not speak. From what I could gather he hadn’t spoken since the spring of 1976. That’s what Dr. Maurice told me the first time I attempted to make conversation with the eldest of our party. He said “Chippy don’t talk. He doesn’t say a word. He hasn’t spoken since May of 1976.� To this day I’m not sure if the story was true or not but the tale goes something like this. One night, in May of 1976, a local oil baron bet Mr. Chips one million dollars that he couldn’t go for ten years without speaking. Mr. Chips took the bet and had not spoken since. At the time I didn’t bother to do the math. I should have. It would have made the conclusion of that week all the more ridiculously entertaining.

I was quick to delve into the lives of the three men that still possessed the ability to verbalize. But as I was to discover, that merely gave way to hours of Slappy’s never-ending analysis of the other two as they sat nearby, nodding whenever the occasion arose. Everyone seemed to give way to Slappy’s “better judgment� about practically everything, not seeming to care how he went about painting their character. He went on and on about how Dr. Maurice could have been one of the greatest psychoanalytical minds of our time had he the strength to curb his appetite for young girls (especially those who were his patients). Dr. Maurice had once had quite a lucrative practice in San Francisco but was run out of town by the fathers of two young girls whom he had taken liberties with. Thankfully he had not been jailed. How, exactly, it led him to become a motivational speaker remains a mystery though. There wasn’t anyone in that town worth motivating.

I met Ernesto in hell. A staunch Catholic, he viewed his time in the middle of nowhere as suitable punishment for killing his wife. Don’t get me wrong, Ernesto wasn’t a murderer by any means, but he blamed himself for her death none-the-less. You see, she had been sleeping with numerous other men while Ernesto was on the road with the circus. One night, returning home unexpectedly after suffering minor burns during a show, he caught her with one of her lovers on the kitchen floor. His wife, so distraught that she had been found out, promptly ran to the balcony, climbed the railing, and leapt to her death. The man, by the way, was Ernesto’s half-brother Paolo Sanchez, the famed South American midfielder. The two of them had coffee while the police removed her body from the boulevard below.

After that, Ernesto decided to retire from circus life and wandered north in search of a suitable place to torture himself. Never one to go halfway with anything, his ceaseless exploration for the most despicable company in the northern hemisphere ended when he stumbled upon Slappy and Dr. Maurice dynamite fishing on nearby Lake Churapiña. As for Rosemary, I didn’t really speak much with Rosemary until after Slappy had abducted her. But by then I did it more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. Her captivity was, after all, due to my overactive libido and naïve misconception that most people are not entirely mentally handicapped.

It was on the second day of my recovery at the saloon that everything went terribly wrong. I have, since then, been dumbfounded by my own stupidity in the matter. One must remember where one is at all times, especially if that locale is in or near any kind of desert. Because crazy things happen in the desert and no one ever hears about them.

In the small hours of the morning is when most things of this nature are born. So there we were, all three sheets to the wind, talking in circles, talking stupid-talk, when I came up with the extremely sinful notion of hitting on lovely Rosemary.

Knowing full well that she couldn’t leave the saloon because she was the only employee and that she absolutely despised the lot of us with a hatred that could not be measured in even the cruelest of units, I decided to give it a go anyway. You see, Rosemary worked at the saloon because her father, an invalid, had been given the place by his father. Rosemary’s great, great grandfather had built it during the late 1800s. Despite the fact that she reviled the customers and loathed working there, she couldn’t bring herself to break her father’s heart and leave town. She dealt with Slappy’s shit by ignoring him. And, to her credit, she did a damn fine job of it. So much so, in fact, that Slappy and the boys rarely bothered to speak to her beyond ordering drinks.

So I found myself cross-eyed and slurring, sitting at the bar attempting to coerce her into a conversation. I will be the first to admit that my behaviour was less than appropriate. I should also have probably kept my voice down. Being that I am rather boisterous when intoxicated. I must admit, from what I can recall of it, Rosemary was a rather good sport about the whole thing. She must have endured my slimy verbal tentacles for the better part of an hour before she hit me in the head with the beer glass.

When I came around I was in the back of Slappy’s truck. We all were. Rosemary was there too of course, bound and gagged within the silvery confines of the love-hold trap. I was bleeding from the head where she had crowned me with the beer glass and was in need of stitches. Her eyes, filled with panic and terror, looked into mine, attempting to make me realize that I was not yet a willing participant in her abduction. Perhaps she did it so that I might help her, I don’t know. Truth be told, I was far too disoriented to fully grasp the severity of the situation. As far as I was concerned, at that moment, things of that nature were quite common in the desert. And who was I to say anything to the contrary? I grew up in a temperate zone.

Before I go any further I must explain the sudden appearance of the device. You see, Slappy wasn’t altogether delusional when it came to his meagre existence in that little desert town. He had plans. One of Slappy’s many hopeful flights of fancy was the love-hold trap. Designed as the ultimate in submissive-dominatrix aids, he hoped to one day mass-produce the cages and sell them to sex shops all over the world. The ridiculous thing about them was that they were just regular, ordinary cages. Anyone motivated enough to that extreme could easily make one themselves or purchase something similar from a kennel or pet store. But Slappy thought it ingenious. And there was just no convincing him otherwise.

It would seem that Slappy took offense to Rosemary hitting me on the head with that beer glass. His reaction to the incident was to gag her with a sock, wrap her head with electrical tape, tie her hands together with a bar towel, and march her out the back door to his truck. Leaving the boys to watch her, he then went back inside for me. Perhaps he had fantasized about the whole thing beforehand, perhaps he hadn’t. It seemed to me as if the man was just looking for an excuse, any excuse, to do something that could not be so easily undone. So the first thing he did was to drive back to his house for the cage. After that he planned to drive into the desert.

It was near the end of the drive that I came around. What seemed like mere minutes had actually been almost two and a half hours. I was surprisingly sober. We all choked on the dust as Slappy sat alone in the truck cab, his foot weighing the gas pedal to the floor, his eyes fixed on some imaginary point on the night horizon. I just lay there and bled. There was nothing left for me to do. I was beyond altering the course of what was about to happen. I would regret it, I told myself, but it was better than the alternatives that had started the creep into my head. Someone was going to be left out there. It sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.

What you are about to read is not pleasant. The truth, perhaps entirely foreign in this day and age, rarely offers tidings of goodwill. This you will learn as your clock ticks. The truth, though commonly misconstrued as something noble and empowering, tends to turn up more often than not sounding of hammer blows on coffin nails.

When we got out there, hidden away from the eyes of the world, lost in the windy cold of the desert night, we stood around pretending not to watch Slappy rape Rosemary. Then we pretended not to do it ourselves. Then, as if set on some diabolically irreversible course, we pretended not to do it over and over again.

Perceptions dictate truth? Most things seem pretty real to me, yet they are comprised of tiny little particle doo-dads. Does such information make them any less truthful? Is there even truth to the existence of such particles and like-minded miniscule nonsense? To properly explore the truth you must first discard the bullshit adage that “the truth is the truth.�

I convinced myself that I hadn’t done anything, despite the fact that I just had. Consumed by feelings of self-loathing, attempting to convince myself it was a crash course in how despicable behaviour can serve to further individual experience, I did my best not to outwardly crumble while I went about it all. Mistakes are made in every life.

I’m not exactly sure when we realized that Rosemary was dead. It was sometime the following night after a day filled with whiskey consumption, pretzels, and powdered donuts that someone finally realized she was cold. I was sitting against one of the rear tires of the truck, bottle in hand, oblivious to everything save my own hatred for all that I had allowed myself to become. I looked at her immobile body, wondering what it would have been like to wake up next to her or carry on a conversation about something mundane while she was in the shower. I did my best to convince myself that she was merely sleeping. And then I lost it and killed everyone.

It’s a horrible thing to live in fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of others, fear of yourself. Better to become the master of those fears than allow them to consume you. After hours spent attempting to rationalize the most unforgivable thirty hours of my life, I decided that it would be best to stop trying to convince myself that I had simply slipped up. I had fallen, no question about it. So why not hit the ground hard and leave an impression.

Like any good desert dweller, Slappy had a gun rack in his truck. Two rifles were to be found on it. One was a hunting rifle, one was a shotgun. I ended up having to use both. After shooting Dr. Maurice and Ernesto with the shotgun, I was left with little choice but to use the rifle on Slappy. He had started to run. Now, as drunk as he was, he still made decent time. Being that I’m not entirely familiar with distances as they might pertain to rifles, I can’t say exactly how far Slappy was able to go before I shot him. I used the scope. Once targeted, I steadied myself and proceeded to shoot him in the back of the neck. He was flung forward, rolled around a bit, and then lay still. It was that simple. All of it was that terribly simple.
Stranger still was that after having shot Slappy, I turned to discover Mr. Chips standing next to me, his head cocked to one side as if he were appraising my marksmanship. A round of uncomfortable seconds passed between us as I deliberated whether or not I was going to shoot him. He just stood there, his hands on his hips, looking out at Slappy’s body, an entirely removed expression on his face. To his credit, he did not flinch. He didn’t try to run either. Even when I turned towards him, the rifle held at waist height, my finger still on the trigger. He just stood there, calm as could be. I decided to let him live. I also decided to burn everyone. Everyone except for Rosemary. Her I buried.

Perhaps you were expecting something far more interesting. Let me assure you, there is nothing interesting whatsoever when it comes to such things. There is only the doing of it. The telling of such occurrences, though always touched with a bit of danger and mystery, never quite lives up to the true depravity of such actions. And therein lies the sickness that we embody as a species. Horrified by the fact and entirely mesmerized by fact sold as fiction.

Slappy Mutt Mutt was just a man. One man alone in a place without boundaries. One man left too long in the searing heat of imaginary inner workings with enough hours for them to conquer what little reality remained. I, too, am just a man. A man that did what had to be done to survive. I am not proud of what I did. I derived no pleasure from it. They say that from all things, no matter the outcome, something good emerges. I would agree. I am a much better shot than I used to be.

Having buried Rosemary, feeling altogether meaningless as if doomed to know the secret of things but unable to warn the world about itself, I turned to Mr. Chips and began to mutter something about the sheer insanity of us. Sitting down on the ground, I could think of nothing else but to put my head in my hands and weep. I have no idea why I did but it seemed the proper thing to do at the time. And that’s when it happened. Eclipsing the sun, he walked past me and scanned the dry desolation before us. And that’s when he said it. Shaking his head slightly he muttered—“We are men never by choice…but apparently always by fault.â€?

Collins Mini English Dictionary defines the following words as such:
Hue and cry/n./public outcry.
Nap/n./short sleep. v./napping.
Ran/v./past tense of RUN.
Tombola/n./lottery with tickets drawn from a revolving drum.
Wow/interj./exclamation of astonishment.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.

—Robert Frost