Duuuude? What happened last night? That was crazy! Wasn't it? It was, right? We totally drank so much liquor/alcohol at that party and it was really good. Right? Yo, whose seen the rest of my costume? It must have looked sooo sick before the tragic series of events that led me to apparently burn it off of my body altogether, and I would totally bust to have something to remember last night by. Also, just to reiterate what I was saying right before the midnight reverse-chug: that crucifix I brought was my Mom's, and I promised her no one would use it for sex or crimes or whatever, so if anyone sees Jeremy just please pass it on that my folks need that thing outside of him ASAP.
If I smell one foul odor on that thing, I’ll glue staples to all your festive socks, Jeremy! Speaking of which, who put that stocking over my dong and sag? You really saved me from embarrassing myself too much, but...did you have to touch my buck-fifty to get it on there, or did it fit like a glove? I just like to keep a list of the people who have touched my stem and seeds for...nostalgia sake. Also, who is Sarah, and why does she keep texting me saying, “Thanks for the scrub. My feet were very calloused”?
Was Sarah hot? Is that the assumption I’m making? God, I hope she was hot, it’s been weeks since my body temperature was above 60 Degrees. She was the closest thing to a lead I had on what happened last night, so I guess she was my go to. Also, did I fucking touch feet? My hands may have the sickening texture of a baby’s unformed kneecaps, but that did not make me an a la carte massage-guy. Maybe it was my costume…. Shit, that would be a clever costume. Why don’t I ever write these down? Yeah… a couples costume for Sarah and I: a woman with disgusting feet, and I, her personal masseuse.
It would be a relatively simple costume, especially considering that Sarah often had her disgusting feet ready and on display. She didn’t need any SFX makeup to make those babies look any more horrifying than they already did in their natural state. I do remember getting a lot of compliments, though. People really seemed to dig the truly effortless look I was sporting – khaki shirt and khaki pants – even if I did get confused for an offensively sexy Steve Irwin a few times.
I might’ve looked like the Crocodile Hunter, but apparently I acted much more like a possessed Bear Grylls. I definitely don’t remember eating John’s old kidney that he brought home from his kidney transplant. I didn’t even know they let you keep that. Also, it wasn’t really exactly my fault -- I'm pretty sure he just left it just sitting in a Tupperware container in his fridge. What was I supposed to do, not ransack his personal belongings to fill me up? Clearly I was gonna use that kidney more than he was, so maybe I actually did him a favor by taking it off his hands. Or out of his fridge I suppose.
Anyway, his loss was my gain. By the time I left his house I was a whole kidney richer, which is like, 100% more kidney than I previously had to my name. My immediate thought was to sell it on the internet, but I know from the time I tried to sell my stepmom on eBay that that shit wouldn’t fly. So I called my buddy Ian and asked him if he wanted to buy a kidney for a hundred and fifty bucks. He told me that I had already tried to sell him one last night, and I didn’t know anything about that, so I asked him if he knew anyone who would be interested in one.
The answer was a very aggressive “no.” I hung up, staring at the ground, and turned to head back into the kitchen. So much for Ian’s help. How could I even hope to begin to piece this together? I licked my dry, dry lips and adjusted my skin: it was starting to get a little snug. I poured myself my sixth cup of coffee and stared at the hole in the wall which I had, up until that moment, paid no mind to.
There was something wiggling in the shadow of the hole. I held the cup of coffee tight in my hands, almost too tight. My palms began to burn and I wished I had some more Bailey's. It had been a long morning already. Leaning closer to the hole in the wall, I heard a soft thumping noise. Bump. Bump. Bump. My face was three inches from the hole when my nose was bitten. I screamed, dropping the coffee into my lap, scorching my exposed crotch. Hanging off the end of my nose was an enormous worm, at least a foot long. I couldn't stop screaming. My neighbors yelled from the floor above me.
“What on Earth is going on down there?” screamed Sheila, the woman whose life above mine was as much a mystery to me as the drunken events of but eight hours earlier. “Worm situation!” I hollered back. “What?!” Sheila was mad. She had clearly been drinking not too long ago, which was disappointing but unsurprising. She had had a history with the bottle going back as far as I could remember, from at least yesterday all the way up to perhaps today.
“Worm situation!” I yelled again, sure this time that she had heard me. Unfortunately, she had. Soon enough, Sheila was plummeting down the stairs at an angle that had to be head first, and then, not too long after that, maybe like an hour or two later, she woke up and kept coming. Around noon, I heard her really start back up again. She must have initially landed quite close to the bottom step, for no sooner than I heard her groggily ask herself “Did I get dirty like this on purpose, or on accident?” was she running again, full sprint, straight through my wall. It was obvious to me now that Sheila had been trapped inside the skeleton of our tenement building for hours, maybe even decades. She was no longer simply wet with blood and morphine and rats, but was now also painted head-to-toe in the white, dusty innards which once held our respective homes in their places. I, too, was even messier than before, as a large chunk of drywall had exited with Sheila and lodged itself in my gut.
“Sheila,” I cried out from behind the still-swelling worm, sure that the closest thing I’d ever had to a mother would offer up a decent explanation as to why our building was now collapsing at free-fall speeds. “Do you have any idea who might’ve clogged my toilet?” We reached something like a terminal velocity as the countless lives on floors below us began flooding out into the streets. Cars were now hydroplaning in the flood-high syrup of lives which had come and gone, in turn crushing the pedestrians who chose to swim backwards against the current. Sheila lifted up the smoking remnants of a taxi cab, hoisting it’s red-stained-yellow body above her head. She took aim at a police officer who had been pinned at the waist between an ice cream truck and a stack of Wall Street Journals. “Trevor,” she said coldly, her eyes still locked on the 17-year NYPD veteran who would soon get crushed and trapped inside the newspaper like magic. “Trevor clogged your toilet. Trevor takes the fall.” It all made sense now. Trevor, whoever he was, wherever he was, was a total douchebag. But he was also so much more than that. He was my best friend. He was the brother I never had. He was the cop whose screams now echoed forever in an inescapable chamber of failing print journalism. Fuck ‘em.