‘Free Bird! Play it again Georgia.’

‘Georgia?’

He opened his eyes even as he reached for the stoner bone-rack babe he had met at Hell Bent For Leather last night.

‘Wait, that was Friday night!’

‘This was Saturday night. It was Amy, the fat one from Pub Chub.’

‘Gone, both gone.’

He opened his eyes to the filtering light that crept in the basement windows above, to illuminate his ‘empire of the mind’s eye’ as he had called it, when wooing ladies back to his dubiously appointed man-cave in Steevo’s basement.

The heat was out, and he knew the concrete floor to be cold, hence the sensible precaution of leaving his dirty clothes evenly spread out as a carpet, to be gathered and washed once a month. His bed spread and blanket had so many cigarette and reefer burn holes in them that they were supplemented by his various coats and sweaters.

‘Snug as a bug in a rug!’

‘Where is she?’

He looked over to the table, round and lonely, save for the three empty bottles of whiskey, and found the answer in their emptiness.

‘What time is it?’

He looked to the clock and saw it was blank. The power was out again. There was a scratching noise on the window. He looked up, expecting to see the cat, and saw a nickel-sized spider instead.

‘Oh shit dude, Pearl Boy laced that weed with embalming fluid again.’

His stomach growled in protest. Joe had not eaten since dinner on Friday afternoon when he got off of work and hit the bar. That shrimp salad sandwich was now long gone.

Breakfast. Pancakes. The diner.

He crawled out from underneath the pile of old coats and sweaters, and sat on the edge of the bed, letting his feet dangle like he had from the top bunk when he was a kid in Author Mangle’s carnival. He had been the balloon boy, then air gun guy, and finally the man in the water tank, with an insult for everyone!

He looked over to the coffee pot and saw that he had not preloaded it. The three day old coffee was settled into the glass pot like a magnetic black mass, with a patch of mold floating on the top like a reminder of life.

He stood and stretched, already dressed in jeans and sweater and socks. He pulled on a coat and reached for the loose brick in the wall behind which he stowed his cash. The brick was already out, sitting on the windowsill, and the slot was empty of cash.

‘Amy? Georgia?’

Fortunately he was no longer either drunk or high, and was able to recall taking the $500 Steevo had paid him for the refrigeration work. This might seem a bit absurd, as Steevo paid him on Friday and rent was due on Sunday. But Joe liked his feeling of freedom, that sense that he could take the whole check and run away, join the carnival again, and get back to living on the road. But it was winter, and he was near sixty now: time to settle down. Old habits die hard though. He had taken the $500 promising to return his $100 rent to Steevo on Sunday.

And there lay his empty brick vault of the ages, empty but for dust: liquor, pot, beer, pot, wine, hash, beer, more pot, liquor, and hash again!

‘Yep, it’s gone.’

‘Shit, Steevo will kick my ass and evict me if I do this again.’

‘You know he feels sorry for you because he thinks your some kind of addict. Play the pity card.’

‘Hell yes Son! Hell yes!’

It had worked before and would work again. Back in the summer he had been out on the street watching the cars roll by while he read High Times and the Amsterdam Vice Chronicles, smoking his Wednesday after work joint, when he passed it to a dude, who happened to be a cop.

Not only did Steevo bail him out and pay his fines, but he let him slide on the rent that week! However, the last time he was short on rent, and tried it on purpose—even giving a lit joint to a uniformed cop—the cop just bogarted it and walked off, thanking Joe with his middle finger when he complained and called the cop a pig. He later found out that cops were no longer picking people up for personal quantities.

‘Oh hell yes!’

Joe looked at his trophy shelf, were he kept the autographed baseball from that pro pitcher who dropped him in the water tank 100 times in late September on a cold ass night in 1983 on the Ocean City boardwalk. Next to that was his other prized possession, his homemade, PVC whiskey bong!

‘Yes, smoking an ounce of hash and open container in public. Steevo will have to bail me out!’

He loaded it, fired it up, took a mighty drag, and headed up the stairs and out into the cool day. It was afternoon so Steevo would be at church doing good. He was in the clear.

He let the door slam shut behind him and noticed the cat—Steevo’s psycho cat—murdering a big round spider with curiously sparkly eyes and a beetle’s wingback. The cat was ripping it apart, chewing pieces, and spitting it out among the remains of other such creatures.

‘Some global warming shit I guess. Oh well, time to toke!’

He huffed, and he sucked, and huffed, until he thought he’d blow his brain in. He then held it and stepped past the cat down the stairs to the sidewalk. Stopped, stood, and closed his eyes as his lungs felt the mighty burn! All that anxiety that had built up in his sleep from sobering up and not smoking was washed slowly and inexorably away by this drag of all Sunday drags. People thought that smokers had no lung capacity. Joe had developed his lung capacity to the level of an Olympic swimmer so that his chest could contain the spirit of his stress-reducing deity for minutes.

He felt a needle prick on his neck, and another on his wrist, which caused his burning eyes to blink open. He saw a small swarm of these fly-eyed beetle-spiders buzzing in front of him. The horror and surprise of it caused him to exhale a gust of smoke as if he had been hit in the stomach. The cloud engulfed the swarm of bugs who dropped like lead weights and began to spin out like crazed tops on the sidewalk at his feet.

Something popped on his neck, like a big pimple, spurting blood out on his bong. The right wrist hurt and he looked down to see a bug sucking blood from his vein with a long mosquito nozzle. It was literally filling up like a car at a pump, the white X on its back turning red from the bottom up. Then it exploded as well, spattering the sleeve of his too short good will jacket.

“I’ll be damned!”

He then noticed that no one, not a soul, was about in the neighborhood, and that Steevo’s car was still in the driveway, with Steevo laid out right next to it. That made him real anxious and began to dissipate his hard won calm, so he took another huge hit, coughed up some lung jell, and walked over to his roommate.

He bent over the form of Steevo, all pale in his sweater, slacks and loafers, a trickle of blood running from each nostril. He bent closer to see if there were any signs of life and a swarm of bugs erupted from the yawning mouth of his friend, swarming like a halo around Joe—who did what a dude needs to do: take a mighty hit and exhale.

‘Shit Pearl Boy, you must of sprayed this down with raid!’

‘I definitely need to get arrested, need to tell the cops all about this.’

He looked down at the sad form of his kind friend, “If there is a heaven Bro, you’re there. Later.”

Joe turned his sights on Harford Road and decided to walk to it at a fast clip, and then make a left and head down through the hood toward the police substation. First he took another huge, smoky, bubbly hit of the substance he had been telling people for years would save the world. Now, not only did his once crackpot assertions seem to be true, but he himself, lowly ‘Joe Blow’, ‘Stoner Joe’ or ‘Joe-I-don’t-know’, depending on the speaker’s fancy, seemed to be the very agent of that salvation!

He held that hit until his retinas burned and then marched, coughing lung jell up along the way, determined to keep hitting his world-saving PVC whiskey bong—loaded with Jim Beam—as he made his exodus.

‘I’m like Moses with a joint, blowing off the insect plague that’s taking the Egyptians to hell.’

Another swarm of flying plague beetles hovered above him and he gassed them, all but one hitting the curb and skittering to their death. The one though, kept its distance and shadowed him, out of reefer range, just keeping an eye on him like some damned cop helicopter, who wouldn’t leave a white dude alone just because he had been seen emerging from an abandoned house in a black neighborhood shoving a zip-lock bag in his jacket pocket. He marched defiantly on down the street, keeping an eye on the hovering bug and stopping every few houses or so to take a hit.

Finally, he made it to Harford Road, stopped, gathered his breath, and was hit with a terrible coughing fit, which had been becoming more severe this year. He eventually coughed up a wad of lung tar and spit it at the hovering sentinel bug, which easily dodged the gooey missile.

He then looked around, up and down the street, and noticed opened cars with people hanging out, bodies laying about, a wrecked pickup truck, and—‘Oh, God!’

Joe looked up above him, up the length of light pole that towered into the dirty blue sky, to see it covered with a heaving, sparkling, humming, multi-million-bug mass of beetle bugs, humming like a living steel spring.

‘Holy shit!’

The anxiety was coming back, all the anxiety of his hard life, spent working carnivals, hustling, doing construction work, shucking oysters, bullshitting cops, house-sitting, and basement living. It all came back in a wave of unease, for which there was only a single solution. Joe held liter to bong as he sucked on that PVC tube like it was the very apple of Eden, and ran down the sidewalk, ran for his life, breathing hash resin and whiskey fumes through his mouth and the air of a dying world through his nose.

His lungs began to burn, and his courage faded as a sense that a huge truck-sized mass of beetle bugs was pursuing him like a cloud out of hell down the street. He did not have the courage to look back. Then it occurred to him that these bugs just might be from hell, seeing as how they had struck on Sunday as church people went out.

‘The Rastafarians are religious pot heads. So it would not be completely hypocritical for me to reach out to God now, would it?’

He did not look back, and could not will his legs to stop, though they did not appear to be taking him too fast. He kept chugging and toking, until his retinas burned like the blazes, and the roof of his mouth, throat and lungs seemed to be on fire. He eyed the street ahead, Hamilton Avenue, like Moses must have eyed the Red Sea with the chariots at his back. He recalled then that the Egyptians had beetle bug symbols. Somehow this scattered thought, drawn into his consciousness courtesy of a History Channel show watched while drinking malt liquor, set fire to the Moses metaphor he had been assigning himself. Joe went with the notion that he was mankind’s savior, if only in this terrible dream that he had somehow failed to awaken from. Stoner Joe, sucking on his bong as he raced for Hamilton Avenue with the devil at his back was, in his mind at least, possibly the father of the last and loneliest charismatic Christian cult.

‘God, you never listened before, but I figure I’ve just made it all the way to the head of the class—the classroom being empty and all. Please God, let me stay high and survive!’

He felt a humming wind at his back as his lungs overflowed with smoke and he was forced to cough and extend his hold on the sloshing bong. But he was there, almost to the river of salvation he had imagined that strip of asphalt to be. As he leaped into the street the world seemed to explode to life behind him and all around. He was in the zone, ready to do whatever it took to survive this beetle plague.

‘I’ve got this God!’

To be continued and concluded in the 2014 novelette Final Hour: Spitting Into the Galactic Wind