Status: Single
City: LOS ANGELES
State: California
Country: US
Signup Date: 2/15/2006
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Monday, June 29, 2009
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Current mood:  melancholy Category: Writing and Poetry
here we have for you a very special treat: the first 7 chapters of the amazing new novel by kit, sometimes guitarist and drummer for the ten thousand dollar tattoo! we think you will adore this book, which we are hoping kit (who's pen name is a.w. fox) will get published. if you have a comment or know anything about the publishing world, please email us or leave a comment at the end of the section. thanks! ok, here is part one of the first chapter!
PART ONE Chapter One The toneless grey of the apartment, whose facade, interior walls and carpet matched the Seattle sky, kept Kelsey asleep until his needy body began to protest.
He had always wondered why Seattle landlords didn't paint the buildings more imaginative colors. Lime sherbet green, Key West yellow, or Mazatlan coral might put off a few suicides, and at least would remedy numerous borderline-dysthymic cases of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Instead, it seemed as if the city's architects, planners, and slumlords took almost a sadistic delight in embracing dysfunction over form. Almost every apartment featured pissy facades whose color did its best to approximate the nauseating apathy of carsickness, wall hues that personified the resigned misery of an elderly agoraphobic, and carpet shades that were the same non-color of insult as the sky on its eightieth day in a row of sunlessness. Kelsey's abrupt return to consciousness was unwanted and acutely uncomfortable. Yet his body, in its intuition, knew that what it needed was two miles away in Downtown Seattle. Molecules in the atmosphere seemed to pulse around him, hurrying him towards a conclusion that he needed more than air itself. A thick coating of sweat seemed to bind him to his sheets, yet when he pulled them away, his teeth began chattering. As he achingly pulled himself out of bed, the familiar vertigo made itself apparent; even his slightest movements resulted in a reeling, dizzying sensation that everything around him was moving out of sync. He'd turn his head to the right and his peripheral vision would shift rightwards a split second later, like a poorly-dubbed foreign film where the characters' lips were still moving once they were done saying their lines. He felt as though someone had poured hot lava down his throat, searing his esophagus and stomach. His heart pounded as if a combat-boot wearing Nazi was kicking against the walls of his chest. He threw on a black hooded sweatshirt, his tight dark-rinse jeans, and headed into the kitchen to get his corduroy jacket. To his dismay, his three roommates were present, seated around the kitchen table. Mikey was a skateboarder who was obsessed with serial killers. He constantly harangued his girlfriend Miranda (Kelsey's second roommate) about her weight, even though he himself had a body seemingly sculpted by Ronald McDonald. The petty, insecure Miranda never ceased to attempt to flirt with Kelsey as a way to make Mikey jealous, even though she once told her boyfriend that Kelsey was "too pretty" to date. She had little interest in anything other than reality television shows, shopping at stores such as Curvy Couture and Like, Totally!, and getting "mani/pedis". Occasionally, Miranda delighted in reading aloud from a magazine called Sexy Gal, which offered didactic, alliterative missives on how to "avoid figure flaws, fashion faux-pas, and food foibles, by following our new fat-fighting diet and fitness plan!" During these declamations, Kelsey realized that the worst thing about Miranda was her voice, which sounded like a cross between a four year old girl's and a mezzo-soprano who had an addiction to inhaling helium balloons. Darren, who had been Mikey's best friend since grade school, was the most bearable, although he too had nothing in common with Kelsey. Darren adored working on his vintage Vespa scooter, sampling microbrewery beers, and collecting obscure garage band records from the 1960s. Mikey whistled when he saw Kelsey. "Damn, Kelsey. You look like death warmed over." "No shit," said Darren. "Are you sick again?" "Or did you just have a rough night, cutie?" Miranda asked coquettishly. Kelsey's cyclical, recurrent illnesses were a constant topic among his roommates. Given the apartment's pin-thin walls, whatever occurred within the bathroom was common knowledge. Darren and Mikey would routinely act sympathetic whenever Kelsey puked, while Miranda would overreact, behaving as if he was a poor leukemia-stricken child on the verge of death. But when he took a shit, they'd all behave as if he had done something unprecedentedly awful. Mikey and Darren would hoot and holler, waving a spray bottle of Glade air freshener around the hall, lighting matches, and asking Kelsey if he had been slaughtering farm animals in the bathroom. It was during these moments that Kelsey wanted to kick their asses, or at least inquire how it was that their asses were so fucking pure that their shit didn't stink. Miranda, on the other hand, acted as if she was so pure that she was above even taking a shit. "Yeah," said Kelsey vaguely. "I'm going out to get some Pepto Bismol or something." Still shivering, he put on his jacket and then headed to the bathroom. He had finished applying deodorant and had just started to brush his teeth when he heard Mikey's braying chortle behind the closed door. "Man, Miranda, you're a real shit cook. That stuff you made last night wasn't fit for dog food. I bet you gave Kelsey food poisoning. He looks like he's gonna die or something." "Fuck you, Mikey! None of you got food poisoning! Darren, you didn't get food poisoning, did you?" "Negative," Darren replied. "Kelsey's different. He, like, has a bad stomach and stuff. Remember how sick he got from that pasty ravioli crap you cooked--and practically forced him to eat, Miranda? And then there was that rancid chicken shit! Dude, I almost puked my guts out from that stuff too! But I think Kelsey would get food poisoning from eating just about anything you cook, especially that awful shit you made yesterday--the kweeche," Mikey retorted. "That's quiche, Mikey, you idiot!" Kelsey heard Miranda screech. Darren laughed. "Real men don't eat keeeche.""Shut up, Darren! I thought you liked my quiche!" yelled Miranda. "Oooh, Darren! Did you really like eating Miranda's quiche?" Mikey cackled lasciviously. "I like eating almost any girl's quiche," Darren sputtered with laughter. "A girl's queefe is another story." Miranda stomped her foot. "I hate you both!"Kelsey heard stereophonic macho guffaws along with the rhythmic procession of angry footfalls, ostensibly Miranda's. He spat out a mouthful of foam tinged with blood from his diseased gums. He exited the bathroom and then the apartment. Walking was difficult. His muscles felt as though they had been afflicted with red ants rendering each joint fiery and inflamed. He hit a red light at the intersection at Pine Street and Melrose Avenue, as a steady line of traffic thwarted his progress down Capitol Hill towards Downtown Seattle. Kelsey's journey extended through the oxymoronically-named Freeway Park all the way down to the distant, pissy banks of the polluted Puget Sound, yet there were many more obstacles in between him and his pharmaceutical panacea--his white knight, his golden princess. At one intersection, a school bus filled with children almost ran him over. As if to add insult to almost-injury, a variety of healthy, gap-toothed little monsters pressed their faces against the bus windows and gave him the finger as he crossed the street. Kelsey queasily wobbled through numerous Friday mid-afternoon shoppers clustered around downtown Seattle's largest mall, Pacific Place. Kelsey couldn't stand the edifice he called "Horrific Place", especially now, as its relentless human traffic delayed his procession towards the cure. He realized why the crowd was so thick: Like, Totally!, a chain store adjacent to the mall's entrance, was celebrating its grand opening. The store specialized in apparel for teenage and twentysomething girls who enjoyed wearing tiny fuchsia halter tops with inane slogans such as "Tease" and "Boy Bait" plastered across their chest. The bowel-clenching bass-thump and falsetto croons of the mind-numbingly vapid yet unbearably successful boy band GuyNormous! blasted from the store's outdoor speakers ("Ooh-ooh, girl, ooh-ooh, I love you, girl, ooh-ooh, more than the world, girl, it's true, ooh-ooh!"). Kelsey found himself claustrophobically coalesced among the mall's countless conspicuous consumers. He tried to look on the bright side--at least he didn't have to go near the mall's food court, where Chicken Kung Pao, deep fried dough, and the tear-gas perfume of pearl necklace-choked matrons assaulted the air like a virulent pathogen. He tried to take a deep breath. The humid press of humanity combined with the relentless anxiety of opiate withdrawal was making him fear the untimely onset of one of his dreaded panic attacks. His body felt like an internal prison; being stuck within the logjammed crowd felt like an external one. Pacific Place took up several blocks. On the opposite side of the road, the sidewalk was blocked off due to construction, so Kelsey had no choice but to remain on the mall side. To make matters worse, a group of clowns and mimes were performing on the sidewalk, further obstructing passage. Kelsey had been terrified of clowns as a child; instinctively loathing their forced gaiety, their tomato-noses, and their overexaggerated, spastic movements. He weaved his way through a group of giggling teenage girls and their nuclear clouds of hairspray. Several of them had the knobby asses of famine victims, yet they all showed their allegiance to the Curvy Couture brand by wearing skintight jeans with the fuchsia "Curvy" insignia splayed across butt pocket. He vaulted around screaming toddlers jumping in place amid the fray, sticky hands amok and mucus leaking ectoplasmic trails from their nostrils to their mouths. Despite his efforts to bypass the crowds seamlessly, Kelsey wound up sandwiched between a muscular, mustachioed man and his obviously xsilicone-enhanced wife, who clasped a red, wrinkled, fist-pumping infant stuffed into a Snugli carrier. The acute discomfort he had felt upon awakening abruptly devolved into its first derivative--pain. Extreme nausea, anxiety, and dis-ease created its own miserable adrenaline. He was a gushing vessel inhibited by a clotting agent, an EMS ambulence stopped by an FBI checkpoint, a desperate sex drive held in check by a virginal partner. Every red light, carefree pedestrian, and conspicuously consuming consumer was an affront to his sickness and need. Kelsey breathed a sigh of relief once he was beyond the downtown shopping district. He then suffered the added indignity of traveling parallel to a crawling luxury SUV that was blaring the latest hit by the rapper Killa Pimp's new white protegee, Snickaz. Like other Top 40 hits, its success seemed directly proportional to its offensive lyrics ("Suck my dick you fuckin' skeeze/jizz don't got no calories"). By the time the car's baseball-capped driver pulled off the still-congested Pike Street, Kelsey was finally at the periphery of The Blade, Seattle's waterfront open-air drug market. It looked like any other blighted urban block in America. Several "residentially challenged" individuals spare-changed outside the ubiquitous liquor store, whose glass windows were tarted up with graffiti. The air reeked with the combined odor of fetid bodies, percolating garbage cans, and the slop produced by the fast-food teriyaki shop, which had mental hospital-like bars in front of its windows and doors. The creepy "adult entertainment" emporium was opening shop for the day, but the busiest non-black market business on the block was undoubtedly McDonalds. Customers sailed in and out of the Golden Arches, grabbing an Egg McMuffin and a coffee before or after procuring other, more pressing Happy Meals. A potpourri of humans, in various degrees of desperation, were clustered right around the intersection of Pike and Second, the epicenter of the Blade's underground commerce. Kelsey searched for a familiar face. He observed two stocky, baseball-capped Mexican guys talking on cell phones, acting as though they were waiting for the bus. Kelsey knew they sold pot, a drug which he abhorred. He tried to ignore a bleached-blonde fortysomething female in huge white sneakers and an eyesore of a purple velour sweatsuit, shrieking about how Lefty's crack deals were "as cheap as my ex-husband, but also as skimpy as his fucking dick." He tried not to catch the sad eyes of a frighteningly young-looking girl. She was slumped against the grated windows of a pawn shop, a large duffel bag at her feet. Her arms were around a boy whom Kelsey assumed was her boyfriend, a blond dreadlocked white guy with red-rimmed eyes and a similarly red-eyed white rat on his shoulder. Kelsey hustled away from the crowd as a whiff of decay-sweet teriyaki sauce made him reel with nausea. He found a newspaper stand that he could prop himself up against. He put his head in his hands and concentrated on the dirty concrete, taking deep breaths. "It looks like someone really needs to get well," he heard, as he fought an almost insurmountable gag reflex. Kelsey straightened up, wiping his stinging eyes. Standing in front of him was a scraggly twentysomething kid known as Len from Olympia. Len was an erstwhile punk rock drummer with an affection for cocaine-heavy speedballs. He rarely dealt at all, choosing instead to finance his habit by being a runner for other dealers. Kelsey usually ignored his attempts at punk rock junkie bonding for good reason. While Len wasn't a total shyster like, say, Bullshit Phil, he still took a ridiculous portion off the top of the drugs he helped his clients cop. In addition, he and Kelsey had little in common. Len was neither an intellectual, a bohemian, or a person of unusual sensitivity, as Kelsey fancied himself. The crust punk cokehead didn't do drugs because they eased his sickly body and overstimulated brain, as Kelsey did. Instead, Kelsey believed that Len thought that drugs were merely yet another accessory to his bad-ass lifestyle. But he did have street smarts, as well as an ability to smell other's fear, or at least their well-educated and privileged upbringing. Kelsey had the latter, but certainly not the former. Today, Kelsey didn't have the intestinal fortitude to wait around for a dealer he knew. He wanted to get what he wanted and get back home. Therefore, Len was the best option right now. "Yeah," Kelsey answered. "I'm really sick. I'm also late for, like, an appointment. I don't have time to fuck around." "It's all good," Len answered. "I happen to have a half gram of dope right on me. Last night was so bad because of the bust, I stocked up on product early this morning. I got some extra, because I knew there'd be lots of people coming here too sick to run around looking for dealers. Wanna buy the half off me right now?" "Oh, yes," said Kelsey. Thank you, Len from Olympia, for your opportunism and your astute business sense, he thought. "Hey, would you mind gettin me a chocolate bun and a mocha from Seattle's Best Coffee first?" There's always a fucking catch with these runners, Kelsey steamed. Yet he was undeniably relieved at the impending easy transaction. As they walked to Seattle's Best, Len chattered continually in his coke-addled fashion. The coffeehouse was three interminable blocks away. Kelsey's dopesickness seemed to increase exponentially as he nodded intermittently, trying to ignore the stress of conversation when he felt so sick. The two of them moved further towards the waterfront. Kelsey stared at the freighters waiting to take their long voyages through the inky waters of the Puget Sound. Hubcap grey clouds mingled with a frosty sky. A foghorn sounded in the distance. Kelsey tried to appear interested in what Len was saying, even as he realized that the runner was taking an unnecessarily long route to the coffeehouse. "And, so, you know how my girlfriend thinks I've been clean the past six months? Well, yesterday she kicked me out of her parents' trailer in Ballard because she caught me with an eightball of coke, so I'm homeless again. I told her that it wasn't for me, I was just dealing to help support her when the baby comes--did I tell you how she 'oopsed' me?--but she would have none of it. I know she'll take me back soon, though, she always does--hey, are you okay, man?"
to be continued in part two of chapter 2!
note on the reading suggestion: perhaps you have seen the movie, but the book is better. written is a similar vignette style as some of kit's writing, davies' brilliant and important "candy" is a brutal yet personable tale of a couple who live in australia and are linked by the addiction to smack. if you like "i hate you, please love me," you will enjoy "candy," and vise versa...
12:47 PM
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