I had expected to find accounts of my activities in the news but did not find anything. I was disappointed. As fun as it was, I wanted recognition for my efforts.
Eventually it made the news, that 8 homeless persons had been burned alive. But no one really cared.
Still, a copper or two could be posted to the area, so I decided to halt my homeless fire fun for a bit, not wanting to go to jail.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The whole thing annoyed me, twofold, that I could not play cremation sport with the bums anymore and that it had gotten so little press coverage. Only a short mention on the local evening news and a tiny blurb on the bottom of the Fox News website! What the fuck?!
No respect! Arsonists are the Rodney Dangerfields of criminals.
No respect. You always hear of murderers, serial killers, mass shooters, mobsters, drug dealers, terrorists, monomaniacal dictators, and all that, but never arsonists.
Why is it that none of us have gotten famous? I guess we had Timothy McVeigh, but he was more of a bomber and a domestic terrorist, not really an arsonist, and he just sort of looked like an asshole. I preferred more random carnage than political violence, anyway.
I thought of ways to change the perception of arsonists. Get us more respect…
I thought of scoring Super Bowl tickets or World Series tickets and setting a fire there. A bucket of kerosene tossed at a star quarterback or coach, watching the jock ass jerkoffs flailing in flames.
I thought of my favorite comedian, Anthony Jeselnik, his comedy special: “Fire in the Maternity Ward,” and how chaining in a fancy hospital in Beverly Hills or Aspen and setting a fire and scorching a bunch of squealing infants would surely amass worldwide attention.
But these were just fantasies. My career as an arsonist arrived at an end when life got in the way, and aside from masturbating to fire videos online, I stopped setting fires after the news broke about the burning of the bums.
I doubled down on my studies, and finished high school, made the honor roll, and joined the Young Republicans. I went to _________ University where I spent most of my time exploring the intricacies of managerial finance, horizontal mergers and economies of scale…
I did not start any fires all through college, except a handful of times, when at summer concert festivals, I walked about, concealing a zippo, and I snuck up behind dirty hippies and lit their long hair on fire. I did that once to a Rastafarian, too, at a concert, lit his dreadlocks on fire and ran off giggling.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Nowadays, for my fire fun fix, I post ads on Craigslist, escort sites. Plenty of women let me pay to have sex with them as I burn them, touching a small blue flame from a blowtorch to their backs as I fuck them from behind and the women bark, whimper and yelp while I fuck to fire footage on my high-definition television.
Burning prostitutes helps alleviate stressors, takes the edge off my mania and philia…
Mostly, though, these days I am in the firm’s upper floor offices overlooking the park, my eyes affixed to balance sheets, tickers and charts on computer screens.
PARENTS GOT PISSED ON IN TIMES SQUARE
“They were in Times Square, for New Year’s Eve.”
“Never understood that, celebrating New Year’s with all those strangers, standing in the cold, in a place so fucking crowded.”
“And how did it happen?”
“I don’t know… He just said his parents got pissed on by somebody.”
“I assume it was a man.”
“You never know.”
“It was so clotted with people that the pisser probably couldn’t reach a bathroom, was stupid drunk, I’d guess.”
“It was New Year’s Eve…”
“I wonder how it went down. Did the guy whip it out and start shooting, like a deranged killer, wantonly spraying down everyone?”
“And packed in like sardines, there’d be nowhere to escape. You’d have to simply stand there and take it.”
“Nowhere to run. Some freak, unzips his fly, cock flailing in the night, pissing wildly, pissing all over you...”
“The pissing guy screaming like Rambo, all: “RAAAAAAHHH!!!”
“Nah, no way. I think it was that the guy couldn’t hold it, went in his pants and the parents were wetted by it.”
“Can’t imagine a person breaking out his dick, pointing and pissing at some random people.”
“I can. People do worse. Of all the tragedies that could befall you, it is low down on the list.”
“Don’t be too hasty to judge. Perhaps he was actually a good Samaritan. Like he scanned around, spared the others, spared the children.”
“Pissing on a child, that must be a sex offense. Chris Hanson shit…”
“Chris Hansen.”
“Hansen?”
“Hansen.”
“Marilyn Manson.”
“Isn’t Marilyn Manson dead?”
“No, Marilyn Manson is alive and pissing on people in Times Square.”
“Marilyn Manson is pissing on children.”
“It has to be a sex offense, pissing on children...”
“Even by accident? Say you’re in a public bathroom, pissing in a urinal, and a crazy kid comes running in, accidentally runs into your stream, and you blast his snotty
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer little face with your golden bladder juice. Fucking next thing you know, you’re in jail, getting shanked, getting your cheeks busted by a tatted-up Aryan Brotherhood gang member. Fuck…”
“I’m using the stall from now on...”
“Or did the piss originate from above? A balcony shooter. A roof shooter.”
“The Oswald of Piss…”
“A second shooter theory. One from nearby and one from above.”
“Dude’s parents had enemies…”
“Magic piss. Ricocheting.”
“A rooftop pisser, a sniper. Like someone at a crowded party, couldn’t make it to the bathroom, relieved himself off a roof. Did it innocently enough. Thought he’d hit a dumpster or some shit, accidentally sprayed dude’s parents.”
“You really think it was incidental?”
“Accidental. It was an accident. I want to believe that. It helps me maintain faith in humanity.”
“What’d they do afterwards?”
“Who? The pisser?”
“No, the parents…”
“After what?”
“After they got pissed on...”
“Not sure. It’s an awkward conversation to have…”
“Piss must have frozen on them.”
“Icicles of piss, crinkling off them…”
“I’d punch a motherfucker in the dick if he pissed on me.”
“But what if it was Shaq? Bet he’d piss like a fire hose. Has special toilets installed in his house.”
“I’d save the piss, the Shaq Piss. Sell it on eBay.”
“Still don’t understand. How does anyone get pissed on in Times Square?”
“Why does anyone go there for New Year’s Eve?”
“Dude’s parents probably won’t go back for New Year’s again.”
“And if they do, they’d deserve to be pissed on…”
WE WERE FAGS
I was a fag. So were all my friends back in middle school.
Only one or two of us were bi or gay. But to everyone else in the school, we were fags. Every single one of us. And we didn’t give a fuck.
It was true Darwin, our middle school. 1990s suburban America. It was animal.
Social selection. There’d be regular ass-kickings. Kids in the hallways kicked, punched from behind. Group beatings in bathrooms. Faces in toilets. Faces slammed into lockers. Wedgies. Purple nurples. Ears flicked. Seats yanked out.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer We rarely participated in such barbarism or fought or picked on others, but we would fight back when necessary, and we’d mostly lose, catch a beatdown.
Because we were fags.
Spazzes. Weirdos. Kids with fucked up haircuts, kids who wore out of fashion clothes, shopped at Goodwill stores and changed clothes when our clothes somehow became in fashion.
We were fags.
We read tattered secondhand sci-fi books, horror books by Stephen King, and we wrote shitty poetry, graffitied dicks and balls, tags, band names and haikus on bathroom stalls and played in shitty basement bands full of out-of-tune, distorted guitars, off-tempo drumming and shrieking tone-deaf vocals; our punk covers so horrendous they’d make Kurt Cobain want to shoot himself again.
Fags.
This was before school shootings, mass shootings were a regular occurrence.
Probably one or two of us would have shot people, given the chance, like probably that balding asshole, beer gut vice principal or the burning breath teacher who verbally abused us, turned his back on the bullying.
Or maybe we’d have blasted a jock or two, shot up a football or basketball game, if we had the opportunity, had the idea, but it didn’t really register as a thing back then.
Like, why would we? We’d rather hang at home, smoke weed, strum guitars, and play video games, shoot people in video games.
At least in video games you can shoot people and not have to go get beaten and buttfucked in jail, or not have to shoot yourself afterwards.
Plus, you can hit the reset button, play a new game and keep shooting people…
Video games are infinitely better…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer And you might be thinking that we never got laid because we were fags. But we did. Maybe because even the shittiest garage and basement bands attract groupies. Maybe because girls liked “bad boys” and weirdos.
All of us had sex at young ages, but the girls we fucked weren’t cheerleaders, but were also fags, girl fags, girl versions of fags, girl weirdos and potheads. Girls with limps. Girls with big tits but small asses. Girls with small tits and big asses. Girls with speech impediments. Girls who wrote poetry and cut themselves.
Almost every girl we knew had been attacked or raped by the jocks. The jocks were always raping people, sexually harassing girls. One girl with big tits, at her old school, had a running back after her, constantly cornering her, ordering her to show him her tits and finally the running back tried to tear off her shirt in the hallway.
And he got away with it too, because he and his parents complained of racism and because he could play football…
The majority of the jocks’ sexual attacks happened at parties, usually to a girl drunk on a sofa, getting raped and Bill Cosby shit.
In retrospect, the jocks probably deserved some kinder, gentler, more anodyne version of Columbine, like maybe getting blasted with paintball guns or tasers or mace instead of bullets. They were rapists, the jocks, after all, and not disputable, questionable rapists like Kobe Bryant, but real Harvey Weinstein rapists, and serial date rapists allowed to rape because they excelled at sports.
That’s how it was.
They were the jocks.
And we were the fags...
...
The biggest fag of us all was Lenard.
Literally, he was big, 6’9 in 8th grade. He was a German American, who was that sort of special German, northern European, Aryan caveman mix of fat and muscle and stout, Alpine snow-white skin, crystal blue eyes.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Lenard could have been one of our enemies, he could have been a jock, he could have been one of them, if not for his personality.
He was too laid back. Sensitive. Liked to read big bulky brick-sized books like Shogun and listen to The Cure and Depeche Mode and didn’t care much for aggressive hip hop or popularity or the latest clothes, fashions, trends. And he didn’t have a fade or a flattop. Instead he had shoulder length dark wispy hair, parted down the middle, mutton chop sideburns and wore solid black shirts and jeans and heavy, murky eye liner.
That’s why he fit in with us. Because we were the same. We freaks, posers, nerds, romantics and misfits. We formed a union, were a conglomeration of fags.
Aside from Lenard, none of us were physical specimens. We were short, chunky, uncoordinated, skinny, zit-faced. And definitely none of us could have been, like, maybe a pro athlete, except for Lenard. He could have. He certainly had the physical build.
He was the only one of us who wasn’t bullied, beaten on by the jocks, and when he was with us, in the cafeteria, wherever, the jocks stayed away. Given his intimidating size, they wanted no part of him.
That changed, though, in gym class. Like us, Lenard wouldn’t regularly participate and would sneak off with the rest of us fags, running off into the woods behind school, like escaped convicts, to smoke cigarettes and sip on alcohol stolen from someone’s parents.
But, and I don’t know why, he finally decided to join a basketball game in gym class and, perhaps out of a sense of obligation, we joined him on the court, forming a team of freaks and fags and we were matched up against the jocks.
Of course the jocks ran us ragged. But not Lenard.
We just threw the ball to him, and he’d chuck it right over them, dunked several times. I think he’d played basketball before at the school he’d transferred in from, because the game came easy to him, and he moved way swifter than I’d expect of a dude his size, all juking and jiving, dancing with grace, almost like a ballerina.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer One of the jocks, also tall, but still shorter than Lenard, this crew cut, brace face fuck, named Allen, didn’t appreciate being shown up, didn’t like being dunked on by a ponytailed sasquatch of a fag. Especially one wearing eye liner…
Following Lenard’s second effortless dunk over Allen, and the ball inadvertently hitting Allen upside the corner of his head, Allen barked curses and shoved Lenard and challenged him to a fight, not there, on the court, but said how Lenard had to meet him after school, at the track, behind the bleachers...
3:45 PM.
Lenard pushed him back, knocking Allen off balance, and responded laconically,
“I’m there!” and stalked off…
...
I hated Allen. We all did. He’d been a fag before, two years prior, played drums for one of our shitty bands, and was fucking awesome, was like a taller, younger Lars, but when he’d hit puberty, he metamorphosized into an asshole. A jock.
He’d joined the dark side.
Still, as much as I disliked him, part of me worried for him. With his brace face, he shouldn’t have been fighting, and certainly shouldn’t be trying to fight a gorilla like Lenard. I figured Lenard would bash open his face and I could envision the metal wires of Allen’s braces mangled, his face a bloody car wreck, or maybe Lenard might just rip him limb by limb.
That challenge, that gym class, was in the morning, and after that, the rest of the day, we didn’t mention it, talk about it, but we all knew it would happen. It was a tacit understanding. It was inevitable.
I think we fags were quite looking forward to it, on some level, seeing a fag fucking rock asshole Allen. Allen, that piece of shit, that traitor, that Benedict Arnold. Fucking Darth Vader.
Lenard, our Luke, and like 5 of us fags skipped the 7th and final period, smoked weed in the woods, and debated what was better, the horror movie “Carrie” or its book. Then we walked over to the bleachers for the fight.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Lenard was unnaturally calm; his eyes crimson; his face dark as a cave.
The rest of us, while sky high, were amped up. Two of us had mace; one had a bottle of hairspray he stole from a girl’s locker, which he paired with a lighter, to create a makeshift flamethrower, and I had a can of insect repellent ready. All this in case the other jocks jumped us.
We were flanked to the side by a short hairy Greek kid who whistled and mockingly sang “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” clapping and slapping rhythmically on his thighs and chest. It was our best attempt at drums of war.
...
When we got there, Allen stood at the ready, 6 or 7 big burly jocks to his rear, reinforcing him, clustered shoulder to shoulder. A parabola of smirking dickheads.
As we stepped under the shadow of the bleachers, away from the amber afternoon, Allen shoved Lenard, hard, and yelled, “Let’s go, bitch!”
Lenard stood stolidly.
WHAP! Allen pushed Lenard again, this time harder, the sound like a muffled gun shot. But Lenard didn’t buckle. Not one bit.
Lenard, barely moving, did nothing, stood and stared blankly at Allen.
Then Lenard’s skin shifted. It was as if he’d been hit with a bucket of ice. He went pale as a ghost and spoke, meekly, “I don’t want to fight you.”
Allen, confused, forehead furrowed, eyes narrowed, replied, “What? Come on, don’t be a fucking pussy!”
Lenard’s red eyes got glassy; his voice cracking, he muttered, “No, I don’t want to,”
and a single tear slid down his cheek.
Allen turned to his friends, the ensemble of assholes, who looked bewildered. A chubby black kid in a baggy FUBU shirt shook his head and shrugged his shoulders wordlessly.
“I’m going to fuck you up!” screamed Allen, as he swung back towards Lenard and crept up, got mere inches away from Lenard’s grill, on him like a drill instructor.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Lenard stood sucking his cheeks. Began to shed more tears.
“I’ll fucking kick your ASS!” threatened Allen, his voice seesawing, and he’d stressed that syllable in “ass” with a prophetic intensity.
Allen feinted, mocked a right cross at Lenard. Lenard didn’t flinch, just stood, ten toes on the ground. Despite the tears, he was impassive. The tears seemed more mechanical than hot.
Allen tilted his head, jutting out his square jaw, and peered over at his crew. Some were chuckling. Some were whispering to each other. The chubby kid again shrugged his shoulders.
“Alright then, if you don’t want to fight, drop to your knees and kiss my shoe,”
commanded Allen, pointing to his shiny white and purple, puffy Reebok Pumps.
“And you’ll leave me alone?” asked Lenard, unwavering, though his voice taking on a more hopeful, higher register.
“Yup. Kiss it.” Allen affirmed, still pointing to his right foot, that 100 something dollar shoe.
Lenard dropped down, his gigantic frame folding, and got on his knees, like a dog, crouched and smooched the shoe, the kiss touching the toe vamp, and then slowly rose back up.
“Oh my God!” cried one of the jocks, as they broke into hysterical, cackling laughter.
“Ugh…” scoffed Allen, who waved a hand in Lenard’s direction like he was swatting a fly, and he shook his head at his crew, in dismay and disgust, and they all, at once, clotted together and sauntered off hooting and hollering, the fucking pack of wolves, and one of them screamed “fags!” at us.
Lenard wiped his nose with his forearm and began to walk off in the other direction. His face bore no hint of emotion.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The rest of us looked at each other, unsure what to say. Lenard went off towards the woods, alone, and none of us followed him. The rest of us retreated to a parent-free home, ripped bong hits in the basement and played Street Fighter.
We didn’t talk much about what’d gone down, aside from one of us, violet mohawk Mike, who pontificated, like, “Dude, I don’t know why he didn’t fight.
He’s much bigger. He could have fucking killed Allen if he wanted.”
I can’t remember who, but someone replied, “He’s like the white Gandhi.” And that was the last we mentioned it.
Looking back, if it’d happened today, I’m sure it’d been filmed by a cellphone, had made its way onto social media, likely gone viral. Yet another reason I’m happy to have not grown up with aspects of today’s Black Mirror, tech-topia bullshit…
The next day, Lenard showed up to school in a mocha brown trench coat. He’d been quiet, and he looked different, like he was older, and he was paler, white as a bone. We’d smoked a morning cigarette with him, but he hadn’t spoken, and had kept his head tossed back, his gaze at the milky morning sky. We weren’t sure what to say to him.
Later that morning, before gym class, Lenard was in the locker room, getting dressed, and a skinny kid walked by, a kid who was with another crew of losers, idiots always running around the hallways, playing “YOU ARE IT!” tag games. This loser had these funny Alfred Neuman ears that always got flicked or pulled on by jocks, and Big Ears walked by Lenard, snickering, and said something about “Hey, kiss my shoe!”
Lenard spun around, grabbed a fistful of the kid’s sandy blond hair, a big clump fixed at the root. Lenard cocked his huge right arm up in the air, in the shape of a C. Big Ears also had braces, and I anticipated blood, massive amounts, about to be spilled.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But Lenard drew down his balled fist. Lightly pushed Big Ears away. Big Ears, terror of God on his face, clasped a trembling hand onto his ruffled hair and scampered off.
Lenard, who’d been changing into his gym clothes, instead got back into his street clothes, and coolly left the locker room…
...
That night the police showed up to my house.
From my bedroom window, I saw the cops, in two squad cars, pulling into my driveway, blue and red lights flashing, but no sirens. I quickly snatched a bag of weed from my desk, ran to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.
A minute or two later, a clapping knock on my door.
Opening the door, my asshole older brother, in his clean white Duke sweatshirt and sweatpants, stood smiling in the threshold. Lips barely moving through his shit-eating grin, he snorted and said, “Hey faggot, the fucking cops are here for you.”
Walking downstairs, I pondered what had brought them. It could have been any number of things, but I suspected it was about drugs.
Three of the cops were in navy blue uniforms, perfectly creased, with shiny badges that glowed in the vestibule’s buttery glare. One of them, a slightly older, a late middle-aged, Fred Dreyfus looking fuck, wore a well-tailored, wolf gray pin-striped 3-piece suit. They all looked serious, had angry, hornet faces, and all of them rested their hands on their belts or hips. One of them smelled strongly of Brut aftershave.
The cop in the wolf suit stepped forward, spoke from underneath his bushy mustache, and said solemnly that Lenard had stolen his dad’s shotgun and killed himself and asked me what I knew about it.
HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE
The year was 1991. It was a hot and sticky summer day, and I was a young teen, in a record store, flipping through a CD rack.
This was during my delinquency, and I had a case of the sticky fingers.
Holding a Faith No More CD, like a talisman, I was ready to slip it into my Hurricanes hoodie pocket, when I noticed that across from me, in the opposite aisle, stood an older boy, who was sneering and stink-eying me.
It was as if he knew, was reading my movements. He knew I was about to steal the CD. Maybe he works for the store, I thought, and I glared back at him, our gazes locked for an uncomfortable 5 or so seconds, neither of us blinking, until I lost the staring contest, giggled and smiled, and slipped the CD back into its place, peered away and continued to peruse.
Figuring the store’s security was onto me, I resisted the urge to lift anything and soon left empty-handed. Then I went over to a vending machine to buy a Snickers.
As I finished feeding coins into the machine’s slot, I felt a fist collide with my face.
BAP!
Shit…
It wasn’t too hard a punch, but it was strong enough to knock me off balance, fuck up my equilibrium.
Stumbling forward, the vending machine interrupted the force of my fall, and I smacked into it with my shoulder, before regaining my footing. I then spun around to see the boy from the record store, who was now flanked by another older boy. This one missing half a front tooth.
Both boys had crew cuts and wore baggy clothing and generally looked like people who either had been in jail, or probably should be in jail...
The uncouth pair cut striking figures. Their faces twisted masses of anger and rage.
To my young eyes they appeared scary as ghouls…
“Why you staring? You wanna fight? You pussy!” the record store ruffian seethed, his arms spread like a T; his words seemingly exploding from his flapping, chapped lips, flecks of spittle launching as he spoke.
I shook my head, indicating negative. I didn’t want to fight. Especially not two of them.
I had an older brother, roughly their size, who’d beat me, regularly. But two boys my brother’s size, that’d been far worse. Plus, these dudes looked way tougher than my brother, even at his most savage.
Cornered to the vending machine, the snaggletooth shoved me, hard, pain stinging up my spine as it clapped at the plexiglass casing.
After shoving me, snaggletooth stepped back, possibly expecting a retaliatory strike. But I took it as a cue to bolt out of there. And I did.
But the barbarians gave chase, and we went dashing across the mezzanine floor of the mall. Running for my life, I barreled down an escalator, to the first floor, where I luckily saw a group of my friends at the food court, scarfing burgers and fries, drinking cokes.
I ran over to them; it was five of us, and I figured we’d gang up, form a united front. They’d help me, for sure, right?
Wrong.
When I sprinted up to them, they eyed me curiously. Then the ruffians stormed in.
And instead of just fucking with me, the philistines took turns fucking with all of us. One by one. Shoving us. Calling us names. They even stole and smashed one of my friends’ glasses, plucking them off his face and stomping them into the floor.
None of us were brave enough to stand up for ourselves. Our attackers were too tall, too big, and too scary. My friend whose glasses they smashed started crying.
One of the ruffians said they were Brazilians and that they thought Americans were tough and were shocked to see us being such pussies.
I have to say I felt like shit, for not standing up to them, for not standing up for my country, but also, I felt awful for unleashing these demons on my friends. And deep down, I was wishing like anything that I had a weapon, a gun to shoot them
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer with, or that I knew how to fight like Chuck Norris, so I could have smashed their ugly, fucking snaggletooth faces in.
But unfortunately, I didn’t have a weapon, and it wasn’t an action movie.
The ghouls continued to follow us around the mall, tormenting us, until we passed a shoe store, where inside I saw an older kid, working there, a guy who lived down the street from me, an aspiring pro basketball player, who I played ball with a few times, and who was cool, had given me tips on my jumper.
While the ghouls fucked with my friends, I slipped away, snuck into the store, and my neighbor met me at the door, easily saw I was upset. I told him what was going on, pointed out the ghouls to him.
Seeing the situation, from the store display window, and eying the size discrepancy, the brows on my neighbor’s simian skull furrowed and his upper lip curled. He whistled and called over his equally imposing walking tree of a coworker, and they stepped out with me, to have a word with the ghouls.
The ghouls, seeing the basketball players sauntering over, lifting their heads up at stronger taller kids than themselves, backed down, stepped off, quickly, and one of them pointed at me and blurted out, sanctimoniously, in his heavy South American accent, “He was going to steal!”
“So you’re a pussy and a snitch?!” shot back one of the basketball players, feinting a step forward at the ruffians, and the two flinched, their faces blanched, and they ran off like rats.
I knew the basketball player was talking to the bullies. But I must admit that I felt the same way about myself. Like a pussy and a snitch.
I really felt low after that. Like a total bitch. Maybe it’d been better to have taken the beating.
My friends and I went and sat back down to the food court. I’m not sure what we did. I’m sure if this was now, we’d have been on phones. What did people do or talk about before smartphones? I can’t remember.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But I do remember my friend whose glasses got smashed said he wanted to find some kids to go do that same thing to. And it made me wonder who’d done that to those boys who’d fucked with us.
PUNK ROCK GIRL
I’d just come home from the morgue.
I’ve been setting my shoes on fire and running through traffic again.
I shot my charred, pumped-up kicks, like a Knicks basketball, into a roving robot dumpster. Then I delivered the ransom note, along with my keys, to the police, via carrier pigeon drone.
Climbing the fire escape, I punched in the window to my floor and crept in…
Cackling, I crawled on my belly, jumped up and kicked open the door to my apartment. Once inside, I spotted a crinkled-up baby blue maxi pad on the parquet floor.
Purling steam, it was lying smack-dab in a puddle of cherry red blood.
Being a single guy, living alone, I can say for sure that it was not mine.
The window was open too, and I’m guessing that however it got there, it came from whoever or whatever had opened the window. I seem to remember my apartment not having windows, either...
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer So I slipped out of my gorilla suit. Got naked and turned on the TV using my Ouija board app.
All that night, I didn’t dare touch the maxi pad. I just let it lay on the parquet.
Not that I could avoid it, though. I live in a shoebox-size studio apartment. So I tiptoed, danced, and circled it, nervous it might come to life, like little legs, arms or wings or things suddenly sprouting out. The maxi pad flying all about, like a drone, in kamikaze circles, stinging worse than a hornet and shooting laser death beams.
Panic-stricken, my dick thickened, and I dove into my mattress made of butt-shaped cushions. Then I clammed up and cowered under my Dallas Cowboys blanket, shaking in horror and praying for God.
And God said no, through silence. And the maxi pad did nothing. It remained in place. It didn’t sing or tap-dance, either and I spent most of the night in bed, in a fetal position, attempting to move the maxi pad via telekinesis. Occasionally, I’d poke my head up, cautiously, from under the covers, and see if the maxi pad was still there. And it was.
It was like me and the maxi pad were twin corpses.
But when I woke up in the morning, the maxi pad had vanished. The window was gone too.
Today I jumped off the roof of a burning skyscraper wearing a jetpack.
And when I hurried home from the morgue, I was wondering what would be in my apartment this time. And I received quite the shock, when I pulled open the plywood over my door, which squeaked as it’d never done before, sounding more as if it were a cat in heat.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer In my apartment, I saw a punk rock girl, seated on my floor, where the maxi pad was last night. She was cross-legged, in a Buddha pose, and it turned out that it was her making those cat in heat sounds. Her meowing so high-pitched that I couldn’t believe it’d come from a human.
Her head was spinning in 360-degree circles. Until it wasn’t. Then she fused her gaze to mine, curled her thin lips into a heart-shaped smile, and shrieked at me in a voice that sounded sped up, “I want to be a bitch to you.”
There was a bloody kitchen knife lying next to her left knee. So who was I to refuse...
Punk rock girl was pale as a pain pill and frail, fucking rail thin. She had a small head and slithery green snakes for hair, like Medusa. Her unblinking fox eyes were the fucking size of golf balls. With no pupils. Her eyes white as sugar. And she had heavy rouge eyeshadow the color of roses, slathered in hefty heaps, almost melting into her skull.
A matching pair of parallel, apple size, black pentagrams were crudely tattooed on her cheeks and a 3-centimeter inverted crucifix with an upside-down Jesus stick figure had been tatted into the center of her forehead.
I could see her smile dissolve into a frown and then her blackened lips started shivering. I keep my house hot and humid, at about 90 degrees, so this was odd.
But she was shivering. Hard. So fucking hard it was rattling her metal face. Her face full of more piercings than I’d ever seen. Her eyebrows, lips, ears, cheeks, nose, stabbed and hooked and carved into a solar system of sparkly metal hoops, beads and studs.
Hot damn, I liked her duds...
Punk rock girl wore a skimpy jet-black miniskirt, with no panties, and I could see her bald cunt. Her cunt had no slit and looked as if it were the tip of Joe Rogan’s head.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer She wore no bra either, and I could see her big round tits and stiff and thick pointy pink nipples sticking out from underneath her tight tattered black and white striped Jeffrey Dahmer fan club t-shirt.
I wanted to tell her my uncle dated Dahmer’s mother, back in high school.
But I somehow thought, intuited, that punk rock girl already knew this.
Punk rock girl refused my invitation to supper. She then levitated up to the ceiling, clung and crawled on it, like an insect. “I want to be a bitch to you,” she reiterated, this time in a softer, damn near sultry coo. “Please, let me be a bitch…”
Punk rock girl stayed glued to the ceiling and whispered Sylvia Plath poetry to me via telepathy as I ate spaghetti and watched the news from Hong Kong. When I was washing the dishes, she wailed, hysterically, that I couldn’t flush the toilet anymore. No matter what. Don’t flush the toilet. Just put the lid down.
Just put the FUCKING lid down!
Okay, who am I to refuse.
I killed that night clutching punk rock girl’s kitchen knife, mimicking throat-slashing motions and fencing maneuvers. Punk rock girl mumbled, from the ceiling, if it was possible to extract a kidney using a kitchen knife, or with telekinesis, and I prognosticated that someone had probably done it. If not here, like in Cambodia. Or Austria. A Nazi doctor or a dude who was in the Khmer Rouge or some shit.
Flitting an eye up to the ceiling, I stuck my tongue out at the purring punk rock girl, whose body was vibrating and spinning in circles like a ceiling fan.
I woke up early next morning, screaming myself hoarse. Of course, I wasn’t sure if I’d been dreaming, but I’d been picturing punk rock girl shrunk to the size of a Lilliputian. She was naked, with a reflector helmet, ready to go caving up into my
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer urethra. “You’re fucking evil!” I bellowed, as I bounced out of bed, ducked into a defensive crouch, and jerked my genitals through my legs, petrified the punk rock girl was preparing to pounce.
But she was gone. No trace of her.
My “Macarena” alarm tone blaring, I wiped away crocodile tears and concentrated on the coronavirus, poison gas attacks, fetus soup and shark fin restaurants.
Walking backwards, into the bathroom, I pirouetted and preemptively peered at the toilet, which was speckled with blood and smelled of vomit. A neon green cobra splashed up from out of the bowl, hissed and flicked its forked tongue and flared its hood. Then it dove into the piss-yellow water, sloshed, and slipped down the drain.
All the same, I still did my business, and, out of respect for punk rock girl’s wishes, I didn’t flush and simply put down the lid.
I did a headstand and walked on my hands, emerging from the bathroom to spot a bloody kidney, warm and slick and flopping like a baby seal on the floor. I flipped to my feet, then scooped the kidney up, cradled it in my arms, as if it were a baby. I sang it a French lullaby, snapped a selfie with it, and tenderly bundled the kidney into my Dallas Cowboys blanket and fed it to the freezer. Then I placed an ad on Amazon.
After I washed up, in the kitchen sink, I zipped on my gorilla suit, and kicked open my door, and ran, as fast as I could, to the morgue, blasting Enya in my earbuds.
When I got to the morgue, I found our first client of the day, on a metal slab, her face in a painted death smile. Her gray eyes were open wide and looked like shucked oysters.
“Green hair, a real weirdo,” sang Gucci, from behind the computer...
“The cops said she cut out her kidney and bled to death during a Dark Web livestream…”
THE RIGHT PRIVILEGE
They were a cross between rednecks and hippies. It was an unusual dichotomy, how they listened to The Grateful Dead and smoked weed yet also liked NASCAR
and shooting things. How they were into both Jesus and casual sex.
One of them preached that sodomy is righteous and cool with Jesus because it prevents abortions.
The pair had good drugs. The kindest buds, sometimes LSD, shrooms, and coke.
But mostly they just drank and smoked weed.
They were my neighbors, lived across the street, on the upper floor of a subdivided house.
Whenever you walked by their apartment, you'd smell the pungent aroma, the fragrance of funky weed. And you'd almost instantly catch a contact high whenever you'd walk inside their place. Their place fucking plastered in trippy psychedelic posters and Dead memorabilia.
There'd always be plenty of perpetually stoned stoners on the twin couches in their living room; stoners burning joints, ripping bong hits, while video games or videos of 60s concerts or Cheech & Chong flicks played on the big screen TV.
Weed was illegal, sure, but almost everyone in that neighborhood smoked, even another one of our neighbors- who was a cop.
That neighbor, the cop, was musclebound, had lots of tattoos and a porn-stache, and he'd come by to smoke weed with us, sometimes knocking on the door, yelling "police" jokingly, and sometimes bringing a couple of other cops, in uniform, over to burn.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer So, yeah, seeing as we smoked weed with some of the local cops, we didn't worry too much about getting busted.
Shit, we'd hardly ever even get pulled over. You'd have to be driving really badly, like a total fucktard, to get pulled over. And even then, the cops would just take your keys, give you a ride home. Unless you were an asshole to them, talked shit.
Then they'd definitely arrest your fucked up, drunk ass. Make you spend the night in the slammer.
But usually, the cops left us alone. Or were plain nice, smiled and chatted with folks at the diner. I guess the cops had greater issues on the other side of town.
That's where the violent crime was. But strangely, though most of the murders and shootings were there, and cops patrolled the area a lot, still, I heard from a classmate who lived there that if you called the cops, they might not show up for an hour.
In our neighborhood, though, if you called the cops, even for stuff like a snake in the grass or a housecat stuck up in a tree, the cops would be there in a heartbeat…
I grew up nearby, and there was one time when I was a snotnose kid, riding my bike, and I saw a grown man crawling in through the first-floor window of a neighbor's house. He didn't look like Santa Claus, and I freaked out, furiously peddled home, ran inside, called 911. After reporting the crime, the lady who answered 911 asked me if the man was Caucasian, and I didn't know what that was. "Was he white?" she asked, sounding annoyed. I wasn't sure why she'd cared to know that, but I remembered he was.
He was a fat white guy, a hairy gorilla looking fuck, and his ass crack was hanging from his pants, like a plumber, as he shimmied in through that window… I didn't say he was a gorilla or tell her about the ass crack, though…
Mere minutes later, I remember several squad cars came reeeeaaah-reeeeeee-aah reeing in, and a helicopter hovered in from the heavens and sounded warbled police things… Turns out the hairy window guy was a dude who'd been renting the house. He'd just been locked out… Dude must have been shitting bricks when the coppers roared in like that. Bet the motherfucker called a locksmith next time…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Back to what I was talking about before… We didn't venture into that other neighborhood much, except a couple of times to buy drugs. Other than that, there wasn't much reason to go there. And if you did go over there, sometimes you'd be stopped on the street by one of the locals, usually an older man, usually an older man with lots of facial hair and bushy eyebrows and a concerned gaze, and he'd kindly but firmly let you know that you were "in the wrong part of town."
Besides looking for drugs, more people from my neighborhood started going over there, though, when a nightclub opened in that part of town.
My neighbors' cousin's boyfriend was a part-owner of the club, and he said over bong hits that they had gotten a lease on the land for a bargain, and he'd kindly invited us over, gifted us free VIP passes.
He said the land had formerly been public housing, which had been torn down to pave the way for an entertainment district, featuring nightclubs. The development developed in hopes of attracting more affluent visitors to the area…
I'd seen a report about it on the local news. The development being criticized by locals. One of them was this tall round-shouldered deacon with big puffy white hair hanging like a snowball atop his head. He had on this shiny black suit that looked made of plastic and these eyes that appeared glazed, and the deacon was animated as he was saying, in a raspy hiss, something about this being the beginning of a gentrification drive…
My neighbors' cousin's boyfriend's club spun mostly electronic music. Next door was another club that played hip-hop.
I was surprised that my neighbors liked electronic music, because they usually listened to The Grateful Dead and other 60s music, but they said they wanted to have a look at the club, dance and party there.
I was game. I liked all types of music. And still do. And I liked getting fucked up and partying. And still do, sometimes.
The night we were to visit the club, we warmed up before we left, and sank a few shots of tequila, ripped a series of bong hits of some super strong sticky-icky
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer stinky skunk Sativa. We were all pretty fried when we set out to drive over to the club.
As we began our journey, the weather, which had been its normal fall crisp and cool, transformed, like instantaneously. The night grew even darker and then erupted into an angry fit of hail, rat-a-tat-tatting on my neighbor's station wagon's windshield as we pulled onto the highway.
The rain then started falling in sheets. Like a damn hurricane. I could barely see the lines in the road. Everything was just dark and liquid, dark water, as if we were in a boat, in a jungle, in a monsoon, sloshing through a murky river at nighttime.
But my friend, the hippy, looked so serene behind the wheel. He was in the zone.
Hyper-focused. With his ponytail and beard, in the silvery lighting of the car, he sorta reminded me of Jesus.
Big scary semi-trucks barreled past us at breakneck speeds, sending waves and splashes and crashes of water whooshing at our vehicle. But dammit, that Subaru didn't budge. And with Jesus behind the wheel, we rode straight and steady, making it to our destination safely. The rainstorm petering out shortly before we reached the offramp.
However, after Mother Nature relented, Human Nature stepped up to the plate, and we found ourselves in quite the pickle.
As we neared the glittery lights of the club, we rode into the middle of what looked like a riot.
The traffic out front of the complex was backed up for about a block. And there was what appeared to be people that came from a hip-hop video hanging out of their car windows, sunroofs, the hip-hopping people with contorted, scowling and grimacing expressions, and they were gesticulating wildly, throwing up all sorts of hand and finger signs.
I'm pretty sure they weren't deaf people, using sign language, but being as baked as I was, that's what I first thought, “Like, dude, why are all these deaf people so pissed off…" Then, however, because I'd watched so many hip-hop videos, I came to believe it might have been a gang thing.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then we saw there were people in the road, who'd left their cars, or who'd sprinted over from the parking lot of the club complex. They looked pissed off too.
The hip-hopping people in the street were yelling, posturing, doing sign language, and a few were throwing hands, involved in fistfights.
A group of girls strode past our car. One caught my eye. She was the prettiest of the pack, tall and thin, with swirly waves of flowing yellowy hair, heavy makeup, and sparkly silver high heels; the girl in a short black dress that appeared as if she'd chosen it carefully.
The girls were walking hurriedly towards the clubs when another girl, from another pack, ran up on them. The insurgent, in a tight-fitting tiger-print one-piece mini, was about the same age, early 20s, but was far larger, damn near the size of a sumo, and she was screaming like a banshee. Rumbling up behind the flock of pretty girls, the insurgent, the sumo, the she-beast, let loose a shriek and struck the pretty girl I'd seen, in the back of the head, with a sharp rabbit punch.
To my surprise, the pretty girl took it like a champ. She only buckled, stumbled slightly, but kept walking, and hurried her pace.
The she-beast then howled and shouted a string of invective. The she-beast's battle cry elicited no response, though, from the pretty pack.
The cops, in several squad cars, roared in, their sirens sounding like animals.
The cops descended, some with guns drawn, some with shining flashlights, some spraying mace. The cops, screaming police things, began corralling and arresting the fighting sign language people.
Looking to my left, I saw there was a hippy, a guy from our neighborhood, who also sorta looked like Jesus, walking over to the club. One of the sign language people dashed over and accused that Jesus of "rolling his lips."
"Why you roll your lips at me?" shouted the seething sign language man, the angry youngster in dark baggy clothing. The angry young man's pants were hanging so low his entire ass was hanging out, his bright red boxers gleaming through the night, making him appear like a red-ass gremlin.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The hippy just shrugged, shook his head, meekly, stared at the ground and attempted to walk away. But the red-ass persisted. Inquired again, "Why you roll your lips at me?"
And after shoving the hippy, the red-ass launched a wild haymaker that connected squarely on the hippy's left cheek, sending the hippy tumbling to the pavement. The red-ass's nostrils flared, his neck veins popped, and he screamed epithets as he crouched and punched, rained fists at the fallen hippy, who'd curled into a ball on the ground. Then he kicked the hippy in the hippy's hairy head before the cops came and wrangled and handcuffed the attacker, the red-ass screaming and squirming spastically as he was whisked away.
The cops were now looking into every vehicle, beaming flashlights like lasers and dragging out drivers and occupants, searching people, arresting some. No one was doing sign language at the cops, but they all looked a lot angrier upon the cops' arrival. The cops looked angry too, and I saw a cop pepper spray a fat girl who'd been trying to flee.
The whole scene killed my buzz. I wasn't feeling too high anymore. And being that none of us could pass a breathalyzer test, plus the three of us were holding weed, I started to worry that maybe we'd get searched. We weren't in our neighborhood.
I wasn't sure what could happen here.
But when the cops approached, shined the searchlight on us, they saw how panicked we were, and they gave us a look, a look not unlike the older men with bushy eyebrows, the look of them knowing that we were in the wrong place, and that they knew that we knew we were in the wrong place. The pair of cops, who looked like people from my neighborhood, looked away, tacitly, and waved us past, and the road in front of us had cleared, wide open as the Red Sea.
We then drove back to our neighborhood, disappointed to not have checked out the club. But happy to have gotten out of there unscathed. We never went back to that part of town, until it was further gentrified. Well, except maybe once or twice, to buy drugs.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer ED SHEERAN FAN POLTERGEIST