Gunja busts in the front door and exclaims, “did you hear what happened?” I reply, “what?”
“Murders.”
“What murders?”
“There’s a serial killer in our neighborhood.”
“Shut up!”
“For real, here it is in the newspaper.”
Gunja folds open the newspaper he brought and lays it on the table, “check it out.”
The newspaper headline reads “Gluttony Serial Killer!”
Under: “The Gluttony Serial Killer stakes out your house, learns your tendencies and your schedule, then waits for you to leave. He then breaks in, cooks the best meal he can with what you have in your kitchen, leaves it on your dining table, and disappears. Sounds like every husband’s dream, right? The only catch is he poisons the food and by the time you're dead, he’s long gone. So if you find a meal waiting for you when you get home, immediately call the police. The police have pieced together clues and say that the key to catching the Gluttony Serial Killer may be that he strikes only in this county and mainly stalks obese people.”
His last victim had nothing in the kitchen besides sweets and a large bag of grapefruits left at his house by his mother from when she was over recently on holiday. He came home to find a delectable array of desserts based on the theme of grapefruit. His last words were actually, “I’m throwing up grapefruits!”
I state, “damn that’s crazy, sounds like this guy can cook better than me!”
Gunja replies “right, and it says here the last house he got was within three blocks from here.”
“Well whatever, what can you do...”
We go about our regular night and go off to work the next day. When we arrive that night we see a fully cooked shredded flank steak meal with Spanish rice and red beans next to a side of fried plantains. It smelt absolutely amazing. Looked better than when I cook the same meal. I would know, I bought the ingredients. I mean good like something out of an authentic Puerto Rican eatery, the best place to eat in this imaginary Puerto Rican village… I mean there’s a line like 3 blocks down the street everyday because that shit is so goddam good! Really dude, like if your girl ate that shit, she would squirt like a citrus blast good!
I look over at Gunja read the expression on his face and say, “you're getting fat.”
It was hard to tell exactly where we were considering that we were dropped off here in the middle of the night. Dusti and I were hitchhiking down what seemed to be the main road in the town, although there were not many cars to vouch for it.
After a few miles and no ride, we came upon a log cabin diner/gas stop with a sign reading, ‘Puckers. Famous for our sugar plums!’ We enter and take a booth available by the bar. Our waitress, a hippie-type girl with dirty-blond dreadlocks in a pink dress, whose name tag stated simply:
Hula asks us if we’d like a drink, we say “yes” and she sends over the bus boy with waters after our response.
This acne-plagued teenager with a name tag that read “Rusty” prepares the waters on his tray and as he comes over, he trips on the side of one of the booths and a single glass of water falls off his tray perfectly straight down; just in that instance, a man at the bar sitting across from us reaches down quickly and catches it before it hit the ground, without spilling a single drop, without even turning his head to look at the glass while catching it!
Dusti, Rusty and I sit there dumbfounded. The man turns around, calmly places the glass back on the tray and returns to his meal.
I couldn't help myself, I say “Wait a second sir, how did you catch that glass so smoothly? It was almost like you have eyes in the back of your head!”.
The abnormal man turned around, as he did it was like all went quiet. He showed his weathered face to us in detail but we could not see his eyes as they were hidden behind his black-hooded coat. This particularly bugs me because I believe that the eyes are the windows to one’s soul and I could not get a true reading on this gentleman. However, his slender body combined with this long face showed us how wise this man was as he has undoubtedly been through many tough struggles.
He slumped over motioning us to come in close as if he were going to whisper something to us and then he slowly said.
“The human mind is capable of so much more than most believe. People say that the body produces energy which is created from the soul. Your body is simply a container for that immense energy source, people say. If you use 100% of your mind, you would not need the body, you would be able to float freely as an ‘energy soul’. Others say that we do use all of our mind everyday, different parts of the human mind are used for different aspects of life.
You want to know what I have discovered? Well, a man in his early twenties was deeply in love with his known soul mate who shared the same feelings as he did. They were planning a marriage soon and had lived a beautiful life together so far. One morning, the healthy beautiful young woman died in the man’s arms as they were about to embark on their day. This event hit this man so hard that it took several years for him to get back to what people would call his normal self. Over the next decade, he learned that he developed an ESP toward death related issues. He found this out for he always got strange feelings upon the eve of certain deaths that he was near. I only met this man one time and as this fellow looked in my eyes he knew, that after that, he would never see anything with those eyes ever again.”
We sat there in silence with no movement for what felt like an eternity before Dusti asked, “are you a veteran of war or something?”
The man paused then looked at us and said, “all of them.”
The strange bloke then all of sudden squashed a spider with a stomp of his foot as it scurried past on the floor, he then turned around and went back to what he was doing as if nothing had happened.
Dusti and I noticed that Hula, Rusty, and the only other two people in the restaurant, a couple in the back, appeared to have listened and had been equally mesmerized by the story; however, when the story concluded they went back to their activities as if they didn’t hear anything at all.
Dusti and I were equally weirded out by this. We looked in each other’s eyes and realized that we both were thinking the same thing (Let’s get the hell out of here!). Dusti says to Hula, “can we get some coffee to go?” while grabbing some packets of C&H sugar as we proceeded to leave.
As we’re paying our bill we notice a guy through the front window at the pump getting some Diesel. The pump in front was old; it had a hand pump like in one of those old scary movies. It seemed strange to us that a car had stopped here for gas because we had not seen many cars driving that day and we did not see a single sole pump gas while we were inside.
We both thought to ask the gentlemen getting gas out front for a ride, but as we were walking toward him he walked right by us bumping into us rather rudely with his shoulder while giving us a strange look as he rushed inside.
We then continued our path hitchhiking down the road to our eventual unknown destination.
We continued for about fifteen minutes when we saw headlights coming behind us. The car responded to our hitchhiker thumbs and just as we were getting into this four-door primered-paint sedan, we noticed that it was the guy who bumped into us as we were leaving the restaurant; I noticed his appearance and I remember thinking in my head, “he was a Luke Perry looking mother fucker.” Coincidentally the first words out of the guys mouth were,
“Hey guys, my name’s Luke.”
We introduce ourselves.
He then says,
“I sure would hate to be walking out here myself so how bout a lift?”
There was a short pause and then he continued to say,
“Sorry about running into you guys while going into that grease pit, I had to go P-diddy real bad!”
Laughing at the P-diddy joke, we decided to accept his offer and get into his old Cadillac; probably from the early 70’s.
Dusti rode shotgun on the classic bench front seat and I got in the back and we rolled. We both went to put on our seatbelts and smirked at each other upon finding out that this car had none.
I instantly noticed that the Souls Of Mischief song “Make Your Mind Up” was playing on his stereo system.
As we journeyed on, I noticed a bag next to me on the floor in the back seat. I remember thinking something was not right about this Luke guy so I decide to see what’s in the bag. I find a gun and some money in the bag. I look at Dusti who looks at me and points to what he had noticed which was spots of blood on Luke’s clothes.
Just at that moment, all of a sudden the spider squasher appeared in the back seat sitting next to me! Dusti saw him too and both us were frozen at the sight. Like it was some huge dream, the driver door lock (that little knob above the door handle next to the window) jumped up and the driver door swung open with no one touching it or doing anything to cause it.
Dusti looked at me, I looked at him, we both looked at the spider squasher and he proceed to give us the slightest slow nod of his head like if to say, “go ahead my little padawan.” Dusti then grabbed the oh shit handle, lifted his body in the air and drop kicked the seat-beltless Luke out onto the road. He then took the wheel, jumped into the driver seat and slammed the brake to pull the car over. The spider squasher who was in the back seat had vanished and all that was left was Dusti and I sitting there in utter disbelief and silence.
We used the car to get us where we needed to go sitting in complete silence most of the way, only talking if it was a necessity. It was weird, you’d think we would talk this traumatic experience through but it was like we could read each other’s minds and nothing needed to be said. When we got where we were going, we dumped the car and gun into a river, spent the cash and went about our business. We later read in a newspaper that Luke had killed everyone in the diner, he probably planned on killing us as well……...
It was a extremely clear evening and Dusti was testing out the engine a little bit. Just a few seconds later, a reflective flicker of a hint of a life force emerged from the fog on the side of the road as they had just crossed the Charles Bridge. Both of their strong intuitions let them know what was about to happen. Dusti instantly slammed on the brakes and they slid for what felt like (check stopping distance for Audi S4) yards. At the end of the slide, they nudged this apparent being which looked somewhat like an apparition.
He’s groggy. He looks at us and says, “I escaped a from an alien spaceship!”
He started to speak and then paused; he did this a few times. It seemed like he was trying to piece bits of information together that his brain forgot. He began mumbling, saying over and over again in a stutter, “Area 13, area 13.” He then said, “my name is Jason but I can’t remember my last name, area 13, area 13.” They set him on the side of the road, ran to the car attempting to leave. They wanted to get the hell out of there and try to forget about the whole ordeal.
Religion vs. Evolution
Just then,
Dumder (Doomder) Reckon, the main character is there!
He’s got your typical 1950’s American male sales pitch voice. When they looked at him, it was almost like they could see through his eyes. His hair was very wavy, it tended to move like the waves of the ocean. He body was so extremely sculpted that he almost looked fake; he was wearing a tuxedo, a nice looking Armani tux.
The first words out of his mouth were,
“have you ever noticed that 3/4ths of the Earth is water. Humans think that they’re so big and mighty but they only control 1/4th of the planet. Even if you include the top of the water that they roam on with their crafts, they have yet to harness the power that lies beneath. A whole society, another existing food chain that the humans barely play a part in. So to speak, they are not an integral part of the structure-society that lies beneath the sea. Let’s put it this way, how smart are the humans? Are you the smartest beings on the planet? How much happier are the dolphins.....................Proof have it, the test for the humans is utopia; the most unachievable goal possible. But it's right in their grasp, what is human nature? The fact remains that humans will never obtain utopia because they must always have something to attack, that is why I am not here talking to you right now; and my kind will never exist to you. Because if we were known you, humans would instantly stop fighting yourselfs and bond together in hatred for us. Having something other than yourselves to fight leads to your utopia. But you humans have more pressing issues to attend to. The people that you call prophets or messiahs were actually interstellar travelers that inhabited Earth. They were sent to spread our code. What you call religion are actually hybrids or adaptations of the code we spread. The code in the beginning was intended to be used as morals to live your life by. If everyone did this, utopia was within grasp. Within the deep sacred texts of your religions lies a deeper code, one of more relevance the humans have yet to uncover. I have chosen to grant you the 3 original religious books that we first gave to your planet. You must use these books to perform these 2 additional tasks.
You must decipher these texts for within lies the date when a comet will annihilate your planet leaving nothing but dust in its path.
Also within these texts lies the plans to build a ship that will allow intergalactic travel with a unlimited fuel source.
He then looks up at the sky and says “rain check” then made a sound that I can only describe as one of those sounds from the movie Dune.
Poof, he and Jason were gone and instantly it began raining with ominous clouds hovering in the sky. Lying where he stood were three religious books.
When Dusti and Gunja later opened the books they found certain lines in the text underlined. They racked their minds for two years trying to crack that code. When they finally figured it out, the date the asteroid was supposed to hit was a hundred and fifty years away; way after their lifetimes. So they casually tossed the code and the books in the ocean and never mentioned it again.
Fast forward 200 years.
Location: Spaceship, close to M42 Nebula
A class meets in the middle of ship looking out a giant window viewing the nebula. They stand next to the feet of two huge statues that rise through the glass into space.
“And that class is how the dolphin race escaped the comet Nibiru that destroyed planet Earth in 2166. If it wasn’t for Dusti Stoves and Gunja Dunn, the two likenesses you see here in these statues, the dolphin race would have perished along with the humans.”
Gunja and I were walking down the street people hate. I remember it was extremely windy that day and my ears were cluttered with whispers. We ran into a girl named Beth who joined us for the walk. A man named Nasty Nate was quite vocal on a corner we passed and as we walked by him he looked over at us and asked the question,
We knew that meant, “do you want to buy my strain of weed called ‘stanchy franchy.’” We were uninterested, so we just kept walking.
Beth then started a conversation. “I just recently saw this movie, I can't remember the name, “Red Mud” maybe? No that wasn't it. It was about acid and the guy took so much that he fried his mind and never returned from his trip. Have you guys seen that movie? it's crazy!”
We replied, “no, but it sure sounds crazy.”
Just then, a short extremely ugly man (about 5’5”, stocky and bald, probably in his forties) that had been walking behind us who had obviously overheard our conversation said,
“I got a crazy acid story, you want to hear it?”
We tried to answer no but he didn’t give us time.
“A long time ago when I was about your age, I went on a trip to Vegas. I took so much acid, I was so fried! I didn't know if it was Easter or something but everywhere I looked I saw bunnies, or rabbits, tall like humans. I’ve had bad trips before so to keep from going there I somehow rationalized it in my mind that Easter was my favorite holiday and decided to run with it. Needless to say, I started to make out with one of them, went back to the bunny’s room and put the term ‘fuck like rabbits’ to good use. You know what I’m sayin’! After that I was so in love with the bunny and it’s love making skills, we went to a chapel and got married by what appeared to be a reverend devil and a dragon witness. I woke up, two days later, when the acid had lost its effect. Looked over next to me and I saw the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life and we’ve been happily married for the past twenty years.”
The mood had went from no interest to sudden obsession.
I reply, “what?”
He responded, “yeah turns out I had been at a playboy masquerade party, what are the odds? Without acid I never would have met my playboy model wife.”
Then he casually strolled away without a name, without a moment's pause in stride. We to this day remain dumfounded.
Location: Somewhere between Long Beach & Beverly Hills
I get a call from my uncle in-law Rich who is moving from Long Beach to Beverly Hills. He asks me if I could help him move and if I knew anyone else who would like to help.
I reply, “Gunja and I will help.”
He replies, “who?”
“Gunja Dunn.”
He says, “ok I got Timmy to help us also.”
We take the bus and meet Rich and Timmy at the rental truck company the next day. We show up with no signs of Rich and Timmy. All of a sudden we could hear the Snoop Dogg song “Gin and Juice.”
Keep comin up with funky ass shit like every single day”
Up rolls Rich and Timmy in the moving truck that had spraypaint all over it. They turn off the truck and get out to meet us. Timmy shows us that on one side spraypainted it said “5 greatest rappers of all time” with caricatures of Ice Cube, Ice T, Kool Keith, Vanilla Ice, and of course Dylan (Cuz he spit hot fire!). We all got a kick out of it and then decided it was time get moving.
Three of us could fit comfortably in the front and one had to ride in the back. Timmy said he’d ride in the back and I volunteered to ride with him. We got in the back while Rich and Gunja got in the front cab.
In the front they were sort of lagging to leave. So in the back, Timmy and I were getting along good and laughing at each other’s antics. Timmy began to talk about movies with cargo-vans and semis driving with the back door up or doors open.
Rich finally turned on the truck and began to proceed to his house taking as many back roads as possible. Dusti and Timmy were now talking about the opening scene from the original Beverly Hills Cop where Eddie Murphy is hanging out from the back of the semi full of cigarettes.
As we came to a stop sign on a fairly steep hill, Timmy decided to attempt to replicate that scene. In the front though, Gunja convinced Rich to try out the power of the lorry's engine. Just as Timmy was grabbing for the strap on the back, Rich punched it and Timmy fell to his knees just barely grabbing on to the back end of the vehicle. I was well in the back of the cargo section and could not react fast enough to help him out. Timmy hanged on and dragged by knees for about a block then fell on the pavement doing about ten somersaults before coming to a dusti crash on the side of the road.
I tried to get Rich and Gunja’s attention by pounding on the rear of the cab, but you know Gunja’s love of hip-hop music and the rapper Canibus. He was bumping “Dead By Design.”
“Who the fuck is you to criticize a lyrical king
you see, that’s my problem, I spit a thousand bars y’all was silent
I ain’t heard nothing about it
I had to give you three years to recognize
And then I realized, can’t nobody even fuck with my rhymes”
The only thing I could do is hang ten until the next time they stopped the vehicle which was not until we arrived in Rich’s neighborhood. Even then, Rich was pulling a series of California stops and I could not get out to alert them.
It was once we arrived at Rich’s house that I could tell them what had happened. They called out ‘bullshit’ but soon changed their minds upon looking in the back. We backtracked and finally found Timmy walking wearily on the side of the street. One of the most hilarious sights I had ever seen in my life was witnessed that day. We all laughed about it when we got back to Rich’s with the most hearty laugh coming from Tim, “grrgfh, grrgft, grrgft, grrgft!”
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