Chapter 6 read by Jeremy

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6

Kelsey sat on a camel.

She pushed a sack of deer heads onto its head.

-¡Fuck you!- She exclaimed. -¡March, I say!-

The poor animal looked at her with an eye of desperation. But then it was peeling out like a pair of CIA agents in Venezuela. It wasn’t a monster truck, it was a monster animal.

Kelsey’s head started to race like a Formula 1 car. She couldn’t think, until the camel came to a stop to lap up a half-eaten pie.

She had, what many would call, her head up her ass. She had, what many would see as, gangrene. She could see where she was. She just couldn’t conceive of how she got there.

She turned on a light and knew that either her head was up her ass or the light had burned out. She didn’t know which way to look. There were no signs saying NO LOITERING and there were no ads for THE ASS PURSE. With no signs to tell her what to do, Kelsey pinched her nose and wrestled with her self like a pig in pie spit.

But without the obligatory Amway sales pitch.

And without the lancing of the boils.

And without the playing of the banjos on the beach.

And without the playing of the polo.

And without the caring of the if she lived or died.

And without the And in the first part of this six-part nonsense.

Kelsey had to gyro-sober in order to look calm, because she was really desperate to see the hyenas and the kangaroos.

And she also knew that there was no “God.” No matter how many times some super-real being vaulted down, said or did something incongruous, and then vaulted back up into the “heavens,” Kelsey still saw no salvation in looking limply to the blue skies in the hopes that some kind of multi-dimensional, and of course White, being was looking back at you.

Kelsey was approaching calmidity but was getting tired of the cold compresses. “These animals really stink”, Kelsey thought “no matter what part in God’s nine-part plan they’re playing”.

“¿Whose side are you on?”, she asked her self.

She looked like a lost elephant. And it was already two in the middle of underdeveloped. And it would soon be six in the far side of overly endowed.

Kelsey would have to come another time to see the camels and the anteaters and the meeses and the mooses and the mouses. But she would never be able to sleep again. For the most part all she could see were earwigs and the assholes of earwigs. She had come sixty miles and all she’d gotten was a pat on her diminutive ass by the Pope from a car full of Corinthian leather.

She thought she was quite the bitch. She imagined a Porta Potty instead of a Crapper. And she wanted her own labia instead of having one brought to her by a dog.

¿And what if these images never went away? She’d probably sit on an escalator forever.

That said, she thought again about cost-accountancy and resolved right then and there to see if El Vez would elope with her. But the problem was that she couldn’t sing. She really couldn’t sing. And she danced like an anteater with three legs, and she wouldn’t know a quesadilla from a dormer.

The light of the silvery moon was like God being played by Irene Cara, and Kelsey was desperate. She knew that God would vault down, tell her she’s a quesadilla and then return to Its dormer… only to vault down again because It forgot to tell her what a dormer was.

The eyes of Texas weren’t upon her combination plate and they weren’t even up to looking in her general habituation.

God saw to that.

Right in the fiction section.

And then right in a congregation of platypuses. Actually, one platypus: Drew.

Kelsey looked into the mirror in horror at the mention of that bitch’s corresponding nom de plume as it poured invisible ink and started meting out camel hairs.

¡No, no! Kelsey tried breathing air and when that didn’t work she tried convulsing like a rat in a petri dish. ¿And if there had been millions of dead platypi on that Petri dish? ¿Or millions of baby-back camels?

The mind expands and contracts at the thought.

The heart, however, also expands and contracts. In a very palpable sense. In a palpable sense that makes no sense. Any palpable sense that it does make is compromised the minute the bars open.

Take a look at all of the sense it makes to pay attention when you’re getting into a bathtub with a camel. You could get into a bathtub with an armadillo blindfolded or in your sleep. Take your pick, because they’re both as obscure as all get out.

Look at your shoes. And look at how young you are even though another year has just passed. ¡And look at how much you’ve grown!

Then look at how you describe your self.

I’m not a banjo player. And I can’t run 70 miles while playing the banjo.

It doesn’t take much to see that that was one horrible description.

¿What about your nervous tick? ¿And your labia-inferiority complex? ¿Your hand that trembles at the first notes of the “Star Spangled Banner”?

And lastly, how your eyes light up like flares with an expression that says “If I were a tree I’d be an abject, horrible tree with a touch of Dutch Elm’s disease. I’d be tall like a desperado playing her guitar on the beach.”

But when she opened her eyes, every object was in its sequential place.

A Crazy Cart had been routed into a PEZ dispenser.

By a god.

Riding on a camel.

On land.

A ray of sun collapsed on the window and dabbed at the Jay Leno pendant at the nape of her neck. Kelsey had missed lunch, raised hell and called the sunrise a sinister plot to bring back the dirigible as the sole source of transportation.

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