Chapter 1: Loneliness Is A Loaded Gun

Chapter 1

Loneliness Is A Loaded Gun

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

                         -Niccolo Machiavelli

     I like to refer to the morning in question, as the day that I woke up. The day and every part of it were in all ways wholly unremarkable, except for one little moment that created a domino effect that would impress even researchers of Chaos Theory. 
   
     Like the origins of the universe itself all things to come could be traced back to one central point, one infinitesimal second out of a life in which thousands upon thousands of seconds had already passed by. It was the sort of experience an addict or a drunk would call their moment of clarity. The moment that I realized, that for all these years, every ounce of morality and empathy I had thought I had felt was just habitual.

     I remember every detail of the moment, and the sharp quality in which it stands out in my mind hasn't degraded an iota. I was twirling a tooth pick between my front teeth, and staring out the window of the diner right off the highway, across the street from the Motel 6 that would later become a temporary home base for some of my business girls. I saw a cyclist zip through traffic, and just before a car was about to hit him, its brakes jerked it to a violent and abrupt stop.

     A waitress and a couple dining in a window booth saw as well, and they gasped it terror thinking he would surely be killed, and then let out simultaneous sighs of relief when it turned out he wasn't. In that moment before I knew, when as far as I could tell he was done for, my lips began to unconsciously curl into a smile.

     I felt an urge, a desire, gnawing and tugging at my center, and I realized that I wanted this absolute stranger to die. I took joy in my expectation that before I could blink, that worthless son of a bitch and his ugly spandex outfit would no doubt be mangled and tossed onto the curb like an empty fast food wrapper.

     I was shocked, because I had somehow convinced myself that I was a caring and conscientious lover of all God's creatures, but when I looked back I couldn't remember a single time where I had truly felt any real emotion at all. That is, until I felt the angry lustful desire that came over me as my eyes hungrily waited for this car to slaughter a man, who for all I know is a good man with a wife and kids.

     As the thought crossed my mind that this guy had a family, like another domino toppling over, I realized I didn't give a fuck if he had a family. Fuck him, fuck his wife, and the dog and the kids can all go fuck themselves. I finally, after almost thirty years of putting one foot in front of the other and drudging through the monotony of life, felt free. I could almost swear I was actually weightless for a fraction of a second.

     Everything finally made sense. I wasn't a failure in life, I just habitually held things sacred, that as it turns out, were utterly worthless and superfluous. How could I have been so blind and brainwashed?

     I stood from the table and headed for the door, and as I reached to push it open, the waitress behind me was squawking "Sir, your check. SIR!". I reached into my pocket, pulled out a handful of loose change and crushed crumbs of Tylenol tablets, and I threw it blindly over my shoulder and behind me toward her god awful voice. I had more important matters to attend to. Like whatever the hell I felt like doing, and all extemporaneous details be damned.

     I walked down the sidewalk in a wondrous stupor, like a blind man's first day in the world with sight. I was brought back to reality by a buzzing vibration in my pants pocket, followed by my phone's ringtone. It was my boss. My yuppie corporate whore of a boss, probably calling to bitch at me about the length of my lunch break.

     I pressed the accept button and held the phone up to my cheek. "Yes?" I said in a plain emotionless monotone.

     "Are you going to make it back in to the office any time today, or do I need to pack up your desk and give your job to one of these eager young faces clamoring for your position?" he asked, his voice dripping with superiority.

     "Listen, bitch. I'm done being your fucking workhorse, your scapegoat, and your whipping boy. For all I care, you can suck the fat dick attached to every one of those young faces clamoring for my job. And as far as packing up my desk is concerned, it would be for the best if you did do it, 'cause if I so much as step foot back in that fucking cesspool you call your domain, I might just torch the motherfucker to the ground. Starting with you and your cheap Men's Warehouse suits and your twelve dollar haircut, you fucking faggot."

     Damn it felt good to be alive.

Let's start this off with a bunch of words I strung together to convey the way it feels to love the mother of my beautiful daughter, Lily.

 

Days Drag On

by: Kristopher Brantley

As time goes by, I'm still so shattered.
As time goes by, wondering if I matter.
As time goes by, you're still so shallow.
And as time flies, can't help but hate you more.

The days drag on, I still regret you
The days drag on, wishing I'd never met you.
The days drag on, but soon I'll forget you.
And every day that's gone, is another crack in my heart.


She holds my poor heart in her hands,
but I do not think she understands.
The ill effect she has on me,
she cuts me deep to watch me bleed.
Then she laughs and smiles wide,
and I am filled with warmth inside.
To know that I made her feel that way,
still her resentment grows each day.


And I don't know just where I'd be
without her there to torture me.
Sometimes I think it's so surreal
how easy my heart was to steal.
She boxed it up on her top shelf.
The only love she feels is for herself.
And as time goes by and days drag on,
It feels so right to be treated wrong.

Yeah, as time goes by and days drag on,
it feels so right to be treated wrong.

My hands are cracked and they are bleeding,
there's dirt beneath the nail.
And as they see me, the murder leaves me,
with onyx wings they sail.
Now I truly see me, I too would leave me.
No wonder our love failed.

All that I could ever want, and all I'll ever need,
is you right here beside me, and a better way to bleed.
And all we were, or will ever be
is a game she played, a better way to bleed.

 

      I can only imagine what conclusions this draws you to about me or my character, but even though I can't imagine many positive ones, perhaps you have. I am not by nature a glutton for punishment or a masochist, other than my casual interest in the use of teeth and fingernails in foreplay. It seems to me, that our relationship was built on a foundation of disillusionment, and optimistic idealism about love.

      We were children of the rave culture, or party monsters, if you will. Which amounts to little more than enjoying electronic dance music in it's many forms and splendor, and taking copious amounts of stamped ecstasy tablets, crystallized MDMA, mushrooms, and experimental research drugs. I can't blame her for my falling for her facade, because I, unwittingly, had created one for myself as well unconsciously. I portrayed an image of a radically feminine and fabulously stylish playboy heartbreaker, who sold drugs to all the strippers at the club during the week, and to the rave children throughout the country on the weekend road trips we would take as a rave family. 

      I would go to Oklahoma City, to a guy named DJ Already to buy my product. I am fairly certain this is not his given name. I would buy one hundred to two hundred stamped ecstasy tablets for six dollars a piece, and then take them back to our home city. Where we were living, it was impossible to find E, so I had the market cornered. I resold the tablets at 150% profit, for fifteen dollars a piece. This meant that most nights of the week, I had more money than I needed to maintain my gypsy lifestyle, and more ecstasy than I could eat by myself. 

      I surrounded myself with beautiful strippers, cocaine dealers, artist types, and the boyfriends of the dancers I sold to. I remember very clearly on more than one occasion, walking into the club in a neon pink jacket with a fur hood, my eyes and eyelids slathered with a thick layer of pink eyeshadow smeared all over my face, covered with a black pair of Jackie O sunglasses. My dancers would all, some in groups and some one at a time, flock to me and throw their arms around my neck and kiss me on the cheek. Then, as if this hadn't created enough of a spectacle already, they would hand me money they owed me from having pills fronted to them the night before.

      As I'm sure you can probably imagine, seeing as I live in a military town in the southwest, a host of club goers would glare in my direction and mutter under their breath. I always imagined them as muttering, "Is she giving that flaming faggot the money I just paid her for a lap dance?". The Korean ladies who ran the club, three of them, did not have a very positive opinion of me either and had very strong suspicions about me though they had never caught me doing anything illicit. 

      So this was my job, and this was my life. The glamorous world of selling drugs around town all day, accompanying my girls to the club and doing more business at night, then after 2 AM one of the girls would have an after party, or an "after-the-club-party", and we would all go there to pop E, play dance music way too loud, and talk all night long about gossip, philosophy, and sex. They all had their stage names and the personae that came with them, so I became AK47. My name being Kristopher, a misspelling of Christopher, or Christ, so it stood for Anti-Krist number 47 in a long line of antichrists. Throughout history many men have been hailed as the antichrist, like Hitler for instance, and I was humbly 47th on this illustrious list. 

      My romantic relationship with one of the strippers was starting to fall apart at the same time as my best friend's stripper fiance left him. So we moved in together, toasted to being single with festive Nyquil-tinis, and resolved ourselves to being even more next-level badass motherfucking stone cold pimps in the year to come. Our bachelor bungalow was finally complete with the addition of our third muskateer, another Christopher, who went by the nickname of Guido due to his full-blooded Sicilian heritage. As with my moniker, his too had special meaning in that all things related to being a "guido" were characteristics that made you a douchebag. Greased back hair, Ed Hardy tee shirt, protein powders and workout schedules, misogyny and womanizing, etc. He was dubbed Guido ironically, a misnomer, seeing as a lot of badassery was packaged into his five foot five inch body, and I quickly shifted my best friend role from Miguel to him.

     So me, Miguel, and Guido decided that our now estrogen free living space was going to become the hot new party spot in town. Guido and I were no strangers to throwing the bombest bashes in town, but since Guido was from Oklahoma City and had few contacts close to the homebase, he was in charge of ambiance, while I invited the guests. I remember sitting on the couch with a brain/stomach full of ecstasy, a cell phone in each hand, and teeth grinding against each other like a madman as I clamored to pull the party together. 

      The key to having a good turnout at your party or event is to focus your promotion on people with a wide range of contacts. If you get ten people that have a group of 20 friends a piece excited about your party, they will invite their group without having to be told, and before you know it you have two hundred and some change at your event. To be a good party promoter, you don't have to have a lot of contacts to invite, you just need to know multiple people with a moderate amount of friends, and the popularity amongst them to persuade them to come. It helps immensely if you mention that there will be alcohol and drugs on site. 

      The first party we threw at the house was a raging success. I qualify it as ragingly successful based on uncommon and somewhat unique criteria. If you throw a party, and more than ten people end up puking, or more than one person passes out and gets covered in Sharpie marker graffiti, or four different people take too much ecstasy and have existential freakouts that make them reconsider their entire path in life, you threw a fucking awesome party. One of our overdosers, which were certainly not rare, was Erica. Erica swung from Miguel's nuts like a jungle gym, for lack of a more fitting way to describe how enamored she was with him. She was in Miguel's king sized bed curled up under the covers recovering from what I imagine was a "good cry". Guido draped the authentic black bear rug his father gave him, after hunting and killing the bear and having it taxidermied into a rug, over his head and shoulders and crawled into the room on all fours. Then he gets up where Erica can see him and says in a very cartoonish voice, "It's BEAR-Y NICE TO MEET YOU, ERICA". Needless to say this lead to her screaming bloody fucking murder with a hint of bestial rape. She then proceeded to cry for the rest of the night, past sunrise, until she passed smooth the fuck out in Miguel's arms.

      One of my customers that night was fresh out of the penal system, and one of his friends begged me not to sell him drugs. In the drug game, unlike retail, you don't always reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. If a really nice guy who just got out of prison asks you nicely if he can buy your wares for double price so that he can enjoy his new found freedom, you'd be an absolutely shitty person to deny him. So, because I love money and I want all of my guests to enjoy themselves, I sold him one pill for thirty dollars. Which if you remember my business figures from previously in our story, is a 500% markup from how much I bought it for at wholesale. You can't argue with those sales figures. In hindsight, I would have done well to heed his friend's altruistic request of not selling him the pill, because I think it was only about fourteen hours later that he ended up back behind bars. Go figure.

      Being a drug dealer is not as easy of a job as most people would mislead you to believe. It's a 23 hour a day job, often thanklessly, and you spend a god awful amount of your time in a fucking car. Granted, the car we were rolling around in was a wicked sweet Cadillac with heated seats and a Bose sound system, but it still got old between our 2 hour trips to buy product, interstate roadtrips sometimes in excess of seven hours in transit, and the deliveries while doing business in town. So naturally, to keep up with the hectic schedule of my profession and to maximize business hours to maximize profit, I started dosing myself accordingly with the pills that I knew to be more speedy. At the party mentioned above, in it's sixteen hour span, not including the early guests in the hours before and the lingering adult cripples I had created after, I ended up eating about ten or eleven pills. When the sun finally rose, I was sitting on the back porch of the house in a lawn chair wearing a bath robe and a skintight pair of girl's bluejeans. I was staring intently, with a puzzled look on my face, at the early morning light leaking down through the design created by the multicolored autumn leaves on the branches of the trees in the back yard. The colors melted and morphed together until I was sure I was staring at a Magic Eye picture, completely oblivious to everything and anyone around me. I tried crossing and uncrossing my eyes, squinting, and unfocusing my vision until the secret image finally came into view! It was a Magic Eye picture of the branches of the trees in my backyard... Wait. Fuck.

      So that was a small window into who I was at the time, or the egotistical facade I created for myself. It started as AK47, and transformed slowly after exposure to Michael Alig and James St. James into Kristopher Superstar. Riding around in a luxury car, blasting the hottest new trends in techno, fashionably and fabulously teetering on the edge of crossdressing, surrounded by beautiful girls who got ogled for a living, and like me, took home close to six hundred dollars on any given night. I was living the greatest life that my drug-addled adolescent young mind could possible concoct in my wildest dreams. Selling drugs to beautiful people, keeping a thick gangster wad of cash wrapped together with a hair tie, having beautiful women who were higher than a giraffe's ass sitting in my lap wearing nothing but a g-string and liquid latex on their nipples, jetsetting state to state and rave to rave, meeting people from all over the country and having my picture taken in a DeLorean or on stage with DJs. Then I met her. Boofy.

     The same as my supplier, DJ Already, Boofy was not her god given name. It was a childish shortening of her full name, Bethany. Even though it was just a nickname, as I have looked back on the past, I have come to see Boofy and Bethany as two different people. Bethany was the real person underneath, and Boofy was the artistic, fun and funny, up for anything party animal that was the Cher to my Sonny, the peanut butter to my jelly, the vodka to my orange juice. She had a short vitamin c orange pixie haircut, which after a few hits of E, she would cover with various wigs and headbands and other fun dress up items. Playing dress up was one of our major bonding points, and I suppose the only honest part of our relationship, despite the very act being us disguising ourselves as other people. 

      It was like love at first sight for both of us, when we had met briefly the year before my adventures as Kristopher "AK47" Superstar began. The only problem was the existence of our respective significant others. We crossed paths again, as if by kismet or serendipity, years later after both of our life interests had coincidentally shifted simultaneously to the rave and club scene. We fell hook, line, and sinker for the bait the other had used. By bait, I of course mean the facades we had both created to make other people believe we were these awesome individuals, like our egos assured us we were. As it would come to pass, she was not a free spirited artistic party monster, but a shrewd and domineering curmudgeon, who only worked to be knowledgeable in art and music so she would have a basis for being a snob. Myself, on the other hand, turned out to not be a happy go lucky club kid, who felt free in bright neon clothes and makeup and enjoyed meeting new people. It turns out I was something way worse deep inside.

     I shifted in the years that followed slowly into who I am when you strip away all the fluff and frills. A cold, ruthless, sociopath who believes blood is about as thick as piss, and friends are just people who steal from you after you fall asleep. I shifted my clothing to button down dress shirts, with solid neutral colored tied, wrapped up succinctly with a vest, every button buttoned, with the tie tucked firmly behind. I wore slacks, and very professional looking boots, with a double breasted sport-coat that had a special adaptation sewed into the inside breast on each side. On the left, there was a pocket holster for the sheath of my bowie knife, with its razor sharp ten inch blade. On the right, a pocket for my pistol which varied in model between either a Model 1911 .45 caliber or a nine shot .22 caliber revolver. The low caliber revolver quickly became my primary choice due to its lightweight and the fact that .22 hornet rounds are too small to identify with ballistic forensic science. I was Kristopher, The Kid. Sociopath extraordinaire. And ecstasy tablets quickly became kiddie stuff, so I graduated to methamphetamine.

      I realized that the most alive I ever felt, and the highest I had ever been, was after putting a gun in someone's face or while reveling in the simple beauty of the demonstrative fireball that occurs when you fill a beer bottle with lantern/torch fuel, cap it with a piece of an oily rag, light said rag like a fuse and toss it gingerly onto someone's front porch while they unknowingly slumber inside.

     My favorite lines to use on those unfortunate enough to doubt or underestimate me were firstly "If you were ever curious what your insides look like, that's really fucking convenient, cause I'll show you." and lastly "You know what happens to people who try to treat me like a bitch? I come to their houses while they're sleeping and I Molotov the front door, the back door, and every god damn window so that the only way you and your loved ones can escape is to take your chances running through the flames. Maybe you all make it out okay and the dog too, and maybe just maybe you end up in your front yard flailing and screaming, looking like a fucking breakdancing match stick. So if I were you, I'd be a little more mindful of my tone." If it ever came down to a brawl, and I didn't have a weapon, I'd either improvise or throw a right jab into their windpipe while they're still talking trash in my face, nose to nose. Another effective response when someone's getting loud in your face is to rear your head back and using the momentum of your shoulders, slam your forehead into their nose, ideally connecting on your own hairline for minimal collateral damage.

     Now, after I've been released from prison for these and much more nefarious activities, I have learned to keep the beast, to keep The Kid hidden just below the surface, disguised by a presentable, well mannered facade. The outer layer hiding my psychotic inner demon, as some would call it, while I prefer to realistically think of it for what it truly is, is so paper thin that I sometimes wish I were a praying man. This demon, I believe, is my primative base reptilian instinct, the most ancient and basic part of any advanced brain structure, the part of the brain that kicks in when you're hunting, fighting, and most definitely when you're fucking. My brain has tried to rewire itself to nix the excessive intellectual functions like empathy and tolerance in favor of pure driven animalistic predation of the things I want, consequences and other minor details be damned.

     Now I know better. Its not enough to be big, bad, and a wolf. Sometimes you gotta dress up in sheep's clothing to lull others into false security. Then when they feel safe, they pull the wool over their own eyes. So now as I type every word of this, that reptilian sociopath The Kid is on my right shoulder whispering plans into my ear, complete with a shopping list of essential chemicals and clandestine laboratory supplies to facilitate the highest yielding chemical reactions. He's reassuring me that with his help, slick as an oil spill, we will slip undetected under the police radar. He's reminding me that we can cook fifteen thousand dollars worth of dope in just 28 days, and asking me if I think we could have a little fun with that kind of cash and weight. He says "Don't you desperately miss that old familiar sting of the needle biting its fang-like tip into your waiting and hungry veins?" 

And on my left shoulder is nothing but empty space. No angel with a halo to provide a counterpoint to The Kid. They say your conscience is a piece of god that lives inside you. Well, either he's on vacation, or that nancy little faggot doesn't live here anymore. Bitch.