Cosmic Vomit

The bigger the asshole, the bigger the problem.

The purple crystals were more damaging and more exhausting than everything this side of day traders.

-You can’t tell which substances are which when you don’t know your ass from Este Lauder, Colin. It takes two to cause an explosion -This time I was gritting my toes.

-Go on -Colin contested-. ¿Don’t you think it’s significant that bombs never come in designer colors? People just don’t take the time for anything that doesn’t have the approximate value of a home in Bel Aire.

Oh… my… Christ. I can’t even tell if I’m alive. I talk and nonsense floats out. Colin talks and I can’t even tell if he’s speakin’ the English.

-Yeah, yeah. ¿Don’t you see? No one bombs, but in color -Colin said and said again-. Let’s go bomb the downtown business district.

He had put the emphasis on “go” just to fuck with my emotions.

-Um, ¿what was that? -I asked Colin, playing with his emotions like a meter maid playing with tubs and tubs of Crayola crayons.

I broke out my backpack, pulled out some paper and found a crayon.

-Look at this. ¿Don’t you see what a parasitic bastard you are? -He asked.

I looked as he poured emphysema all over my paper and grabbed my crayon. This guy was an instruction manual waiting to happen.

The instructions were written in a trowel of paper that had been colored-in by someone whose parents had never impressed upon them the importance of staying within the lines.

-Let’s go bomb something -Colin did incite the pyromaniac in me-. We have everything we need.

-All right. I agree with you.

Finally a sensible person. ¿How come, whenever I have time to talk with Michelle, it always ends up ridiculous?

-We’re going with substance, instead of quick, miniscule sentiment and the resulting combination of one problem after another.

-We’re doing no such thing until we establish our position in the pissoirs of Arabia -I told him, I told Colin. The bastard-in-a-tube didn’t know what I was on about.

-Great idea -He responded.

We got on the escalator Dad had built for our house, and went to the kitchen. It looked like a Ventimiglian saloon. Jonathan Muller was juggling chimpanzees and talking so loudly that a tornado wouldn’t have drowned him out.

I looked at Michelle on the sofa. She was lying back like a dilettante, looking at Jonathan like he was the latest opposition to a protected wetlands habitat. She thinks boys are steaming chunks of horse turd, except when she looks at Jonathan. When she looks at Jonathan she thinks, “Kill the rainforest”.

-Let’s go.

I was so sure. I pushed my self in the cat pants and went verisimilituding into the living room. I wasn’t there five minutes when Michelle called me an incredible dumb ass and a disgrace.

Colin just made me sick.

-¿Are you ready? -Colin asked, indicating he thought I was a problem of leviathanic proportion.

-Yes -I was so sure again, that all I could say was “yes”, but then again, I need water to breathe.

-¿What the decimal point are you talking about, knucklehead? -Colin burped.

¡Oh my Christ in hell! After I pulverize this armadillo, I’m watchin’ “People’s Court”.

Colin was looking at me like I was eight months pregnant and about to take the couch apart for fire wood. But I wasn’t going to do that.

-Hell no -I was, again, so sure.

Colin was the kind of guy who left tubes of toothpaste all over the house, but never brushed his teeth.

-“Hell no” doesn’t mean “Kick me in the nads”.

-Idiots. ¿Why are you still alive? -Michelle could smell us from Encino, and we could see her worn-in spot on the sofa from Charlotte. Her expression told me she was going to drop-off our eyeballs at “Lens Crafters” for a tune-up-. ¿Aren’t you on probation, Al? -She asked me.

-No, I’m not -I mentioned-. No shit.

-You don’t even know how to play with your self, and you never will until you give your self over to a nunnery -Michelle was gripping-. ¿Isn’t there an instruction booklet that comes with you?

-¡Fuck the hermetic, seagull instruction booklet! -Colin exclaimed, throwing a paper airplane-. It’s not my fault that my house was bombed in a living color, Hatha explosion.

Thanks Colin, I thought. Thanks a lot.

-¿Do you think you’re going to bomb the entire odor of my high school reunion? -Michelle said with the grit of a guppy-. You do that and I’ll tell Mom and Dad you’re held together with Velcro.

Colin and I froze in the kitchen.

-And, ¿am I ever going to have any peace, or are you going to keep playing mind games? -Michelle was gripping like a Spalding basketball.

-¿Does your brother know what color your house was bombed in? -I heard it, but I couldn’t believe that Michelle had said it.

-¿Are you sure we have the same Mom and Dad? -I axed.

My sense was that that was a completely stupid question. What she describes as playing around I describe as gravely serious. But it doesn’t take a pissant to know that Michelle and her friends think I’m the devil come to study how to bomb them all into living color.

-¿What are we going to do with this porketeria? -Colin asked me, under his salty breath.

-Shut up, Sponge Cake.

-Since when are you a bastard? -Colin asked me.

-I’m not, I’m just tired and I’ve got piles -That would shut Colin up, but how to shut Michelle up was a rarer matter. Like neon rain.

¿You’re gonna start being a fucker now? -Colin grunted.

All I could hear were visions of pork rinds dancing in my viscous fluid.

-No. I’m not gonna be a fucker. I’m going to be a Sikh, high on oleander leaves -I contested.

A colloquialism would have been lamer, but more appropriate.

-Let’s go play “Martin Grammatika” and not tell my mom. She wouldn’t know what the heck a fire was if it came up and said “I’m a fire and I’m as stupid as Michelle”.

-¿Why are you preoccupied with putting down Michelle? -Colin asked me-. Michelle takes her contrariness everywhere. Well, everywhere except shark hunting.

That made sense. Well, maybe in the next century it would make sense.

Chester was sitting in the rain of the sauna. If I had a quarter for every time he did that, I’d be God. I’d also probably be in for a prolonged mauling. And after that, I’d have to walk and carry my self at the same time. I’d be moving along about as fast as probate. I’d be moving like a soft drink that had been laid on instead of drank.

-¿Why don’t you take your math problems and shove them where the stars don’t shine, Chester? -I asked him. Chester took a sigilosecond too long to respond-. Fuck it then. And fuck you. -I sounded like Lady Di after she’d had a few too many vodka shiver shots.

There was a viscous substance of indeterminable color seeping from my underwear, seeping from my pajamas.

A little bit of this substance was responsible for getting Chester pregnant.

And we filled the pool with the rest of it.

And then we did the hokey pokey.

And then we sneezed out our last breath.

And turned our selves around.

This was in the daze before science figured out that the viscous substance, insidious as it was, was only salt, water and a pinch of oregano. After they found that it was basically a salty salad dressing, they threw everyone in prison who had touched the substance, or had put it down anyone’s pants.

-Look -Colin woke up and said-. This resonates even in parts of today.

Ten to one: Colin’s been drinking rat’s blood.

The substance had been traced all the way to the mountains. And half of it was made into pasta by the local chapter of Italians Anonymous.

Now it was making its way into our house.

-My mom had made me marry the northern hemisphere when that stuff got into the house last year.

And a local circuit judge had declared that I was a steaming pile of sake and had given me an enormous roll of toilet paper. As rude as it was tired, it was better than the grand tomatoing that Colin got.

-And you lost the use of your tongue -I added to his misery-. You couldn’t say whether you were just a steaming pile or a steaming pile, with substance.

Colin saw his manhood evolve from Iroq to toadstool in the span of ten cubic seconds. Then it got rolled-up like a wad of paper, and tossed into a garbage can like a baseball.

He was no pussy, but he wouldn’t see his manhood until All Abs Day.

The problem with wadded up paper was that it doesn’t absorb the substance formerly known as salad dressing. Any other time it would’ve absorbed it, but this time it kissed the substance on the cheek and ran off.

-That was really weird -Colin exclaimed-. Rare, but weird.

-It was probably not of this world -I sugar-coated. With all the paper in the world in the palm of my hand you’d think I’d be a little funkier. I travel the world looking at paper, and this substance sticks to me like a sponge on a tin of Jello.

-I encourage my self to be lame. I tell the lamest jokes this side of Billy Crystal -Colin ordained that one right from the middle of his outer gums, which were the color of non-abrasive neon.

-We’re never going to amount to anything other than limping pork rinds. Limping pork rinds trying to escape the ravages of time on our hands. -Colin hissed like a gigantic paper baseball. It wasn’t even his turn to talk, and he’s blabbing and sinking his fangs into the substance.

-We have what we don’t need -I told him-. We have what other people just look at. My mom couldn’t leg-out an infield hit if her tripe depended on it. She goes from 0 to 90 in 10. -I was bringing up more topics than I was able to write down, and certainly more than my combat-sensitive nerves could fandango.

We couldn’t stop mentioning the substance. We mentioned it every day, until even our house got sick of it and started smoking like a fish. And when we took away its paper, ¡watch out! But the final straw, the proverbial hand that broke the banker’s back, was probably when we started singing about the substance.

-That’s right -Colin groaned-. ¿And what are we going to do with all this paper? ¿Tie it to a tree somewhere in Indio?

I looked at him like the shrew he was. At that moment I felt like taking all of the paper in the world and shoving it where the mountains don’t shine.

-No. I don’t want to tie it to a fucking tree. ¡I want to take it and wrap it around your neck! -I responded.

-I think a cord would work better -Colin was getting testy-. Or maybe a tire iron, or a basket of Ensure.

-No. No. I’ll use a Tampax and I’ll put it where the mushrooms roam. No one will recognize you until Saturday -I explained graphically-. I don’t want what you have, what I haven’t, what rats eat, or that freaking substance.

It was starting to occur to me that I was seeing things. Until just recently, I had taken everything that had come my way, capitalized on it, and moved on. It had been perfect.

-We’re going to have to start metering -I said-. And the more we meter, the more I don’t give a good goddamn.

My mom had told me that in a moment of clarity.

Colin started tapping his foot on the floor. He was leaning in the exact way that cats do when their tiara is too big.

-Hey Al. ¿Are you out of your bed-wetting mind? -Mom knew how to piss me off fast-. You’re a toy in this toy box called life.