2227 words (8 minute read)

Chapter 1: Hello, Kitty

I can’t focus. I’ve read the same page of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae five times in a row. How does a pregnancy test come out inconclusive?! I didn’t even buy it at the 99 Cent Store like I was tempted to. Hard times, indeed. What was his name again? Blaine? Or am I just living vicariously through Molly Ringwald in Pretty In Pink?
That degree in costume design at Sarah Lawrence sure did me a world of good, stuck on a barely air conditioned church bus with all these crazy ass strippers. Ladies Of The Knight North American tour! Fucking hell, we’re just an hour out of Vegas and I’m already evaluating all my major life choices. Please, let me be as barren as the Nevada Desert outside my window--
"My titicuts keep slipping out again! Oh, Kitty, Kitty! Can’t you do something!?’
Ah, the unmistakable, nasally Midwest accent of Fauna Glenn. She is one big magenta-haired whine that always manages to have a three fold problem to your one. I’m having a preggo problem and she had two just last week, one with a married guy who used to play for the NBA and the other with a low-on-the-rung gangster type who just got thrown in the slammer for ’tax evasion.’ I’ve always been tempted to tell ol’ Fauna that her stage name sounds like an idealistic 70’s suburb that no one moved into but the ironic thing about her chosen professional name is that it was picked without a shred of the ironic intended. Fauna was her grandmother’s name and Glenn was her dad’s. Fauna herself looked like a thing of nature; colt-like, a huge mane of hair and jungle cat eyes. An Amazon in stilettos and fishnets but, alas, a pretty big void in the ’I think’ dept..
"I told you, Fauna. A legion of times! Stop using your bra as a purse. It’s a foundation garment. If you’re building a house, you want a strong, solid foundation, right? You don’t build on rocks or gravel, do ya? I mean, sure, it LOOKS like a tube of MAC Tequila Sunrise but it might as well be ICBM missile ready to mushroom cloud your Victoria’s Secret Superplush Boulder Holder! Fauna, honey, you got a nice, natural rack, though the right tit hangs a little lower and the left is bigger by an eighth of an inch, so the titticuts are meant to offer valuable support until they are let loose to hang out al fresco. You don’t shove your Motorola in there! It stretches out the fabric AND it’s a cancer risk. Cause and effect, doll.’
I could see Fauna’s eyes glaze over like a Krispy Kreme donut, oh, God...why do I keep thinking about food? That’s not a good sign!
Balls, the newest addition to the L.O.T.K., blasted out ’Brick House’ by The Commodores on her iPod. This might have been her response to my foundation garment diatribe. Balls only communicates through her mobile devices, she’ll never speak even if faced with a direct question. ’How’s your morning, Balls?’ could be met with ’I Can See Clearly Now’ or ’Stormy Monday.’ God forbid it’s anything from The Smiths or Megadeath, that’s when you give her a wide berth. Balls fits the androgyne portion of the bill with her naturally mannequin-thin body and chiseled in stone facial features. She would usually start off in Bowie glam-rock or early 80’s New Romantic and end up all leather dominatrix complete with whip and a real snake. Balls’ act usually had none of the guys coming to the yard for her milkshake but she was a Spanish Fly for the few ladies that were dragged in.
"I mean, can’t you do nothing for me, Kitty Kitty?’ Fauna pouted. ’Maybe, just, hot glue gun the titticuts--"
"Sacrilege! I will never rape a garment with the hot glue gun treatment! Would you ask me to boil a kitten?"
"Uh, no..."
"Well, don’t ever mention such a thing again. There’s always time for a simple top stitch! Give me the titticuts and the bra, please."
With that, Fauna whipped off her Victora’s Secret, letting her fleshy mounds wiggle akimbo in the fetid bus air. The pinkish silicon ’tittcuts’ plopped into my lap dispassionately along with her Motorola as Fauna sauntered down the church bus aisle to The Commodores and a few muted catcalls.
Good, I thought. A task. Nothing like getting my mind off of my current sitch by making a few stitches. I grabbed the bra, my kit, the titticuts, the Camille Paglia and decided to break through the flimsy IKEA curtain paneled barrier created between the Ladies and Nacho Villareal, the bus driver. I liked the novelty of this sad attempt at privacy because why would a bunch of strippers need to hide anything, right? And, Nacho, bless him, seemed so world weary that the idea of sex could only have elicited a tiny little grunt of indifference from him.
"Buena noches, Nacho! Do you mind if I bust the cherry of your solitude so I can get some mending done?"
"Hey, Kitty. No worries. Sit a spell. Want some venison jerky? I make it myself..."
"Oh, bless you, Nacho. I’ll indulge."
"I didn’t hold back on the spice..."
"Even better."
Nacho presented me with a gallon sized Ziploc bag filled with dried deer meat cut in strips and covered with tiny green bits of dehydrated jalapenos. Normally, I stay away from any kind of meat but, what the hell, I could be eating for two and I am so freaking hungry all of a sudden. I chewed monstrously, shocked by the amount of saliva working its way into my mastication. What was that guy’s name anyway? Blake, Baron, Blair?
It was two weeks ago, the kickoff night of the maiden flight of the Ladies Of The Knight North American tour. I plied myself with Tequila Hootchies at the Decoutage Salon, a sad little bar way off the Las Vegas Strip in a strip mall in between a Dollar Tree and a Tobacco For Less store. Vegas is a place where dreams come to die a slow, agonizing death so why not pour pure alcohol into an open fatal wound, right? The movie Leaving Las Vegas is a valentine to this town and that’s saying a ton. How did I get here, you may ask? Why else. A guy. A moderately good looking but insufficient one at that. Laughing at my cliche ridden life here, he was in a band. From Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You may know the type. I now do. Biblically. That everyone called him Rat, even his folks, should have been a sign in of itself. I was fresh out of Sarah Lawrence (which, in retrospect, sounds like I was birthed from some woman I have no connection to.) and Rat was my first ’real’ boyfriend. We broke up a few days before I decided to take this job. It was almost kismet if I believed in that sort of thing. Dumb luck, for sure. Rat said I was ’challenging the integrity of the band.’ WTF. They sound like the late 80’s blew up in your ironic facial hair, they had zero integrity to begin with. I was a free journey-woman the night of the kick-off and that’s when I saw that sad guy at the end of the bar. Brake? Blow? Did he just give me some damn nickname? It was a mutual pity fuck for us both. We bumped and humped in the unisex bathroom. I never saw the goods or even if they were ’goods’, course anything would have felt big after Rat’s mini-cudgel battled around in my sub-basement for a few years. I sure hope there’s a free clinic in Reno since I doubt this grand tour will offer me anything close to an affordable health plan.
"How are you liking the Camille Paglia? I find her a bit didactic for my taste."
"What was that, Nacho?"
"Camille Paglia?"
"Ah! This old thing? I read it in college. I grabbed a few books off the self, thinking I’ll get to reading the great American novel on this tour but I ended up grabbing my old textbooks. Never pack in the gloomy hours, Nacho. Disappointment squared."
"I hear ya’." He said with a sigh.
It took me a second but I realized that Nacho was listening to Art Bell’s Midnight In The Desert podcast. Apt, I thought. What I wouldn’t give right now for a friendly alien probe over a week at Reno’s Big Al’s Girlhouse Deluxe, our next destination.
My current life suck was abruptly broken by the sound of a Harley. I could see the lone, searching headlight rapidly approaching from the tour bus’ right side.
"You got an H-D approaching starboard."
"Starboard, huh? And, you can hear a Harley that far off?" Nacho asked, eyebrow cocked.
"Military brat, dyed in the wool. My Pops always had a Harley--"
"Looks like we got twins!" Nacho cut me off.
Another Harley broke off behind the first one in line and, again, another Harley seemingly sprouted off from the second and so on. A biker gang. Lovely! Icing on the shit cake of my month, we’re about to be taken over by a bunch of hellions on the way to Reno. Well, the joke might be on those guys, these women are actually pretty tough.
"Don’t you worry, Kitty. I can handle it. I used to ride with the Banshees."
I didn’t know how to react in the uncomfortable silence that happened after Nacho’s last sentence. I was so numb in the moment that I barely even recognized that my mouth was on fire. ’Oh, hello, Oblivion’ was the best answer I could give myself as I heard ’The Flight Of The Valkyries’ sound out of Balls’ iPod.
The starboard side Harley caught up to the window next to me as Nacho was flanked on port. I didn’t want to directly look at the creep on the bike so as not to seem interested or even a bit confrontational. I’m just a serf in this animal kingdom and one of the serfs’ rules is to never make eye contact. At this late hour, it was hard to see but I could barely comprehend it at the same time...
"What in the fuck is wrong with these guys?!" Nacho expressed my feelings exactly.
This Harley David-Son-Of-A-Bitch was wearing sunglasses, a bandana covering his face and a cowboy hat. It’s almost one in the morning, no one puts on a costume this late unless they want a little fun or a lot of trouble.
"Nacho? Can we out run them?"
"In this old Mormon P.O.S.? Practically threw a rod reaching 60."
"Any weapons? I pawned my Beretta PX4 before we left--"
"A PX4?" Nacho asked, dumbfounded.
"It’s good not to own something that will put a hole in concrete when you’re breaking up with someone."
"I’ve felt your pain..." Nacho started but I have no idea where he finished after, I swear, I saw Starboard Harley pull down his bandana to reveal the most leering, corrosive smile. I, at first, thought ’no lips’, Rat had no lips or, actually, very thin lips but, fuck me running, this Harley bastard was missing most of the flesh around his jaw entirely! Burn victim, maybe? NO. This is ’other’, definitely. The full moon was bright, high in the sky and I could see the light of it cut across white bone. I audibly gasped.
"Kitty? What is it?"
"DIDYOUSEEIT?! He’s missing his face!"
"Whom?"
"The guy next to me--" And as I was saying it, the bikers sped away but not before Creepshow-face pulled his hankie back up and, in a perverted gesture, gave me the tip of his hat.
"I’m not crazy, right? Nacho, please tell me those guys were wearing--"Sunglasses, bandanas and cowboy hats in the middle of the night? Yes, siree..." Nacho trailed off in thought. "I’ve seen a shit-ton of craziness on the road. People get bored, try to mess with your head just for shits and giggles."
"Nach! He was missing most of flesh on his face."
"Excuse me?"
"Nach, he was missing most of the flesh--"
"No, I heard you but--sure it wasn’t a trick of the light? Night mirage, maybe?" Nacho tried to comfort me but I could sense the fear coming from the back of his throat.
"’Night mirage?’ Never heard of such a thing."
"Sure. Mind plays tricks on you more at night than during the day sometimes. Dehydration sets in but you know thirst stronger when the sun is up. It sneaks up on you, at night. Sometimes, the simplest explanation is the best one. It’s all a lie of the mind."
With that, Nacho seemed resolute and it seemed to me that he thought I should just accept that as well. So, I did.
I didn’t raise alarm when I saw Faceless Harley Dude off the side of the road a few miles up, oddly enough, seeming to be waving at me. Trick of the mind? Didn’t seem like it. I had to fight the friendly, reflexive urge to wave back.
I chose not to scream when I saw Faceless bite down hard on his left wrist, dispatching his hand, the sinews ripping like rubber bands.
Please, Mind. Be lying to me when Faceless tosses his hand under the wheels of the church bus...
"What was that?" Nacho asked me as the bus hit the small bump.
"Probably something incomprehensible." was all I could muster.
Shit? Meet fan.
Kitty? Welcome to the abyss.