down in the hole … with blind mellow jelly

 

What a night. Did that really happen?

Of course not. Fanny didn’t come to see me, she didn’t have fire-red hair, and there wasn’t any head in my refrigerator. She wasn’t a serial killer, either. Wake up, dumbass.

But, just in case it really did happen—just to be on the safe side—I decided to fall back on an oldie but a goody: full-blown denial. Don’t judge me; you’d do the exact same thing if all of a sudden there was a human head in your refrigerator.

You know what separates the insane from the sane, right? It’s the inability to access the part of the brain that processes denial. Insane people are just as sane as sane people; they just see more of the reality all around them. Much more.

So I went into full-blown denial. That, and I started huffing like there was no tomorrow.

The thing about being a huffer is, well, not too many huffers hold onto gainful employment very long. Nor do they maintain their place of residence. Once you decide to cross that line from full-time breather to full-blown huffer, you’re whole world starts falling apart. And fast!

So how did I keep my job? I didn’t. Even the most rock-solid of jobs goes down like the Edmund Fitzgerald if you don’t show up for months on end, don’t even bother calling in.

On top of that, I was dead broke now. All my savings (what there was to mention) evaporated quickly. Apparently, it’s expensive being the Sugar Daddy to a huffer gang the size of the Duggar Family. When those huffing little rapscallions weren’t picking my pockets clean, they were robbing me blind. There was practically nothing left in my apartment anymore. They even took my TV. My TV!

That’s the thing about hitting rock bottom: you never see it coming. Just like with bankruptcy, you reach into your pocket one day and suddenly realize there’s nothing there. Damn! Ernest Hemingway was right. And I thought he was just talking about his alcoholism.

So, without a job, or any money, or even an apartment anymore, I was living downstairs in the basement now. Wang said it was no skin of his nose. “Just don’t burn place down,” he said. Not sure what he meant by that.

Anyway, fuck “having a job.” I could start my own business. Why not? Plenty of people have their own businesses. I hear Alice B. Ruden in 3B has her own company where all she does is sit around listening to whiners and complainers all day. That’s right, whether you know it or not, most big companies these days, when you lodge a complaint, they pass you off to an independent contractor like Alice. For a fee, Alice will sit there and listen while customers call her every expletive in the book. Threats cost extra.

Why Alice? Because she was a drill sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, one of only three women ever. Alice has been divorced six times and has thirteen children. By the time she’s done, it’s the customer who’s apologizing to her.

Tubby Turnipseed in 4G is a Titleist. No, he’s not a golf ball, he names things for a living. Tubby’s the one who comes up with all those crazy names for pro wrestlers, political movements, even porn stars. He actually makes a living at it. A very good living. I heard up to $500 per name, with perks.

There are all kinds of businesses I could start: underarm smeller, bad breath tester, foot odor expert. These are all real businesses. Seriously. Or, I could be an animal masturbator.

When scientists need animal sperm, how do you think they get it? While it’s possible to collect semen by means of electro-ejaculation (bringing the beast to orgasm with jolts of electricity), this requires putting the animal to sleep. Anesthesia is as expensive as it is risky, so most doctors just go the old-fashioned route and have someone jerk the lucky critter off.

But who was I kidding? I wasn’t starting my own business. I wasn’t jerking off any animals, either. Heck, I wasn’t even leaving this basement.

And why should I? I didn’t mind living down in the hole. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it. I always liked the idea of being the crazy old man who lives down in the basement by the boilers. Besides, there were no bills to pay, no TVs blaring at me, no phones ringing in my ear; in fact, there were no distractions at all. There was just an old La-Z-Boy®. The humming from the furnace kept me company, and I had all the time in the world to think. Bad idea.

I had more time to think about how I was going to win Fanny back. No more fooling around.

In lieu of having any kind of real life anymore, I decided to invest my time in something much more down to Earth, like a time machine.

What did I need with a time machine? The way I saw it, if I couldn’t find out Where Fanny was, maybe I could find out When she was. In short, I was going to go back in time and undo all the damage I had done. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

If you’ve never traveled back in time, I highly recommend you give it a try. It’s almost as good as a severe concussion. All it takes is a few bits of basic machinery and some good ole American know-how.

First, you’ll need some kind of musical device. Nothing fancy, any old CD or cassette player will do. In my case, I got Wang to box up some of my stuff before they threw it all out. That included my CDs, an old Discman, and some headphones, among other things. I highly recommend headphones. Time travel requires total concentration, so blocking out the world as you know it is of the utmost importance.

Next, you’ll need the appropriate audio tracks. In my case, I went back to those same songs Fanny and I listened to when we were together. Old songs, and old scents, are both great catalysts for traveling back in time; but since I didn’t have a bottle of her perfume, the music was going to have to do.

Now that you’ve got your time machine ready-and-waiting on the launch pad, it’s time to fire that puppy up. My fuel of choice: paint thinner. And not just any paint thinner, but Methylene Chloride, a commercial paint stripper. When I saw the warning label, “Make sure to wear gloves and have plenty of ventilation,” I knew I had the right stuff.

So I let the music play. I spun every one of those songs over and over and over again, but it wasn’t working. It wasn’t taking me back to my time with Fanny but instead to my younger days. After a while, it dawned on me: once a song gets attached to a moment in time, it stays there. Songs have memories, too.

That’s when I discovered a portable record player and a bunch of old blues albums in the corner next to the Tex Ritter box. It was a gold mine. There was Skip James, Jimmy Reed, Blind Lemmon Jefferson, even Papa Charlie Jackson. The blues. The real blues. The down in the mud blues. The Delta Blues.

There was of course some Robert Johnson, but the ones I liked best were Death Letter Blues by Sunhouse, Last Kind Word Blues by Geeshie Wile, and especially Let’s Get Drunk Again by Sam Chatmon. Wow! Talk about time travel. I’m talking ‘back to the time before modern music recordings’ time travel. In some cases, before indoor plumbing, even.

There was another stack too, LA jazz artists from the 1930s and 40s like Buddy Collette, Charles Mingus, and Wardell Gray. Then, there were the original Whisky a Go Go bands from the 60s: Moby Grape, Love, THEM, The Leaves, Captain Beefheart, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Buffalo Springfield, and of course, the First Citizen of the Whisky himself, Johnny Rivers.

Did you know they had to omit the E in Whiskey because local zoning laws at the time forbade clubs to be named after alcohol? True story. LA was a very different scene back in 1964.

That’s when I decided the best way to get back to Fanny was to reverse thrusters back in time almost a hundred years, then crawl my way back up. So, I opened up another jug of rocket fuel and launched myself into orbit.

It was a glorious ride. I let the records play themselves over and over, circling around in time and space until inevitably I came crashing back down to Earth. I was out of fuel.

When I awoke, I realized I was still no closer to finding Fanny; but man, was that ever a wild ride. Let that be a lesson to all you kids out there: that’s what paint thinner does when the instructions are not followed properly. You kids stay in school.

After that, I took a good long nap. Time travel can be quite exhausting, you know.