Arthur Graham’s Reviews > Thunderbird > Status Update

“You should eat something to get your strength up. We’ve got pizza hot pockets.”
“I’m going to die tonight,” he said. “I don’t want a fucking pizza pocket.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen.”
“Use your nose. My leg smells like an Arco gas station bathroom after a zombie took a Burger King shit in there. Why the hell do I need a hot pocket? Garcon! You have any of that Effed Up malt liquor left?”

He kept living the same script with different women with more money. If he thought about how pathetic this was, it would have been impossible, but when you don’t think, it’s not bad. The part that kept him sane was the hope that someday he’d get a book out of it, that he’d keep banging these women with parental money and severe daddy issues; that he wasn’t part of their world, but some kind of spy

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, which makes it almost as high as I am as I write this story. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngage Ngai," the house of god. (This is not to be confused with the Masai slang term “Ngange Nagali," which means to perform analingus on a person of the same sex in the bathroom of a train station.)

The convenience store was actually a North Korean deli, covered with pictures of the three Kims and propaganda art hung above the bags of pork rinds and ring-dings. The food and drink, luckily, were not North Korean. They did have some pretty kick-ass cigarette lighters in the shape of Kim Jong Il, the ones where you click his arm and a butane flame shoots out of the top of his giant head.

You ever see any of those Bang Bus videos?”
“I’m pretty sure those are staged.”
“Yeah, they stage their cocks right into chick’s holes. ‘I never do this’ to mouth to pussy to ass and back to mouth. Look, I’ve got an even better plan."

“Charlie Brown was invented by a Richard Nixon disinformation campaign,” I said. “True story. Back before the Gulf of Tonkin. I don’t remember if it was officially part of MK-ULTRA, or before it, but they dosed Charles Schultz with mad amounts of CIA-grade PCP and had him write story lines for the Vietnam war and corporate profits. I read a whole e-book about it.”
“Fuckin’ Snoopy was a narc.”
“Stone cold.”

“Look at this one,” he told me, showing me a waxed piece of a milk carton, covered in dried 2% low-fat and jism. “20 years old, missing since 97. I don’t care about the original baby picture — I’m not one of those sick fucks. But check out the computer-generated estimation of what she’d look like today — that is some hot shit.”

“Hey buddy, what’s with the bike?”
“I’m riding cross-country for charity. You gonna give me a fuckin’ dollar or what?”
“What’s it for? MS? Juvenile diabetes?”
“NORNL — the National Organization for the Repeal of Necrophilia Laws. It’s a victimless crime. You heard of us?”
“Heard of it? Shit, I’m a card-carrying member. I copy-edited one of their first manifestos, The Dead Need Love Too.”

Thirty years later, Paul suddenly remembered it all. That handless pant-pisser came back from the dead to fuck him in the ass, Steven King-style. And you don’t get a reacharound if the dude has no hands.

Back in the day, in the late eighties and early nineties, the mall flowed with money from all of the people trying to prove their existence. Reagan told us all the years of wearing sweaters and turning down your thermostat and only getting gas on odd or even days were over, and we needed to spend, spend, spend, to prove to the commies that Jesus-fueled capitalism ruled this world.