Post by switchfever on Sept 28, 2014 5:01:06 GMT -5
It was 12:39am on a Saturday night when Switches texted me.
SWITCHES THE CLOWN: {Hey, fruity-booty, I’m in town and lookin’ ta get all goofed-up and party an’ shit.}
YOU: {Sure, bro. Where you wanna meet up?}
SWITCHES THE CLOWN: {I’m at the SuperDooper Hotel on 6th and SunPeach. Room 25b. Bring drugs.}
YOU: {Lol I’ll see what I can do. See ya in an hour.}
SWITCHES THE CLOWN: {Bizzle Dizzle, Jizzle}
YOU: {What?}
SWITCHES THE CLOWN: {It’s just something I say. Like that Snoop Dog stuff.}
YOU: {ok}
YOU: {bizzle dizzle}
I hadn’t talked to Switches for almost a year. He had showed up at my 2nd floor bedroom window at 2:30 in the morning. –Scared the fuck out of me. -Partly because I had seen him kill himself up on live tv and partly because it was a fuckin’ wild-eyed junkie-clown staring at me from my bedroom window in the middle of the fucking night. That was a year ago and we only got to talk for a few minutes. I had so many questions, but he was way out of it and could only seem to talk about how there was a serial-killer living in his brain. So, I obviously had to drop everything and hang out. I jumped in the shower, suited up, grabbed my notebook and headed out the door. My dealer was out-of-pocket, but said he could meet up with me at the hotel in a little bit. I was knocking on room 25b at 1:30am.
Switches whips the door open and greets me with wide-eyes of drug-fueled horror. His face is ragged with week-old clown make-up, dried blood and a coke’stache under his nose. There’s a tv on behind him blaring white noise at full volume. He shoves his head out past the door-frame and looks down the hall with quickness and feverish intensity. He grabs my collar and yanks me inside, before slamming the door closed.
“Get in here!-Were you followed? –Did you bring drugs!?” the junkie clown spewed words at me all strung together in one breath.
“Hey, man! My guy said he could come by here, if that’s ok.” I replied as I dismounted my camera-bag onto the foot of the hotel bed.
“Sure. Sure. He’s cool though right?” Switches inquires as he latches the door lock and presses his eye onto the peephole.
“Yea, he’s cool. No worries. How ya been? What have ya been up to?” I say as I flip the television off. The room is suddenly quiet.
Switches doesn’t immediately answer and continues his eye-raping of the peephole.
“Switches?” I interject.
The junkie-clown turns away from peep-hole and falls against the door. He exhales in a bit of relief. He looks at me for the first time and smiles widely.
“Tommy B! Old friend! It’s been too long. Come here and give me a handshake or a high-five or somethin’” he says while raising the roof with his dirty clown-gloved hands. I opt for the fist-bump and he blows-it with some sort of half-handshake: half-fistbump: half arm-grab hybrid thing that nobody does.
“What’s on the agenda for the night?” I ask as he moves over to the cheap chair and round-table in the corner of the room. The table is riddled with trash, pill and liquor bottles, as well as a smearing of unidentified whitish powders.
“I figured we’d get all goofed up and you’d call up some whores or we could take a run at the sluts down at the hotel bar?” Switches says before shoving a bunch of bottles and trash off the table and onto the floor.
Before I can answer, he opens a ziplock bag and dumps a mixture of loose pills and powder onto the table. “Quick. Let’s do all these drugs.”
The next 20 minutes is a smearing of time and reality as we consume the narcotics. Fast-forward to us downstairs, “all turnt up”, and at the bar ordering a couple of jager-bombs. Unfortunately, the bar-sluts weren't biting tonight as they were nowhere to be seen. Apparently, the skeezy bar in the lobby of the illustrious SooperDooper hotel isn't the hip-joint that we presumed it to be. Switches and I were the only patrons left at around 2:30am on a Sunday morning. The barkeep hustles us out the door after our 3rd round. We shuffle out into the parking lot and sit with our legs hanging out of the back of Switches’ rape-van listening to Queen.
“When I heard that the WcF was going to be in town, I should have known you’d be with them.” I say looking out into the night.
“Shit, I haven’t wrestled for them in years, man. I didn't even know they were here. Motherfuckers still owe me money. I should haul up in there and bitch-slap Lerch and get my fuckin’ money, yo.” Switches says while fishing his fist into his pocket, looking for whatever.
“What brings you to Phoenix, then?” I ask.
“Beats me, man. I woke up here this morning. I was in Arkansas yesterday. Been having these… episodes. -Weird shit. The devil’s in my head, ya know. –And he’s been doing stuff when I’m passed out.” The clown says as he pulls a crack-pipe from his rainbow pants.
“Fuckin’ crazy, man.” I reply. It’s hard to get a read on this guy. Is he fucking with me with this “devil in my head” shit? My phone vibrates in my pocket and I see that Russle, my dealer, is heading my way.
“My dealer is on his way. I’m gonna tell him to meet us out here.” I say while I smear my fingers across the face of my phone.
“Sure… hell yea… more drugs, please.” Switches murmurs as he sags backward and lies on the floor of the rape-van.
He exhales a plume of crack-smoke and giggles for a minute. “Radio-Gaga” chirps out of the van’s speakers and Switches giggles along with it. About three songs later, I can see Russle turning into the parking lot. He’s riding a piece of shit, moped. Russle is a sloppy 300lbs, easy, and the moped absolutely hates it. Russle waves to me and almost busts his ass as the moped suddenly veers sharply to the left. Russle straightens it out at the last moment and safely parks directly in front of us.
“Sup, fellas.” Russle chirps as he unbuckles the scuffed yellow helmet from his unkempt afro’ish hairdo.
Switches groans loudly as he uprights himself and stands up out of the van.
“You got drugs? Crack? PCP? Mexican Lip-Snips?” Switches comes on strong to toward Russle.
Russle is startled by Switches and stumbles, letting his moped flop to the cement.
“Whoa there, man! What the fuck, Tommy? Who is this guy?” Russle pleads to me while back-stepping from the strung-out clown. I try to grab at Switches’ arm but, I’m fuckin’ wasted.
“He’s cool, man. He’s coo…”
Switches pounds a right cross into Russle’s brown face.
“Gimmie the goddamned drugs!” Switches is clawing at Russle’s pockets furiously. Russle does a kind of spin and hammers Switches across the face with a haymaker. Switches is fired backward and slams ungracefully into the open door of the rape-van. The clown ricochets off the door and onto the pavement. -Instantly snoring from unconsciousness.
“Fuck, man! You called me down here for this bullshit, Tommy!? Fuck you, man! Not cool, dude. Totally, not cool.” Russle chastises me as he lifts his moped and yanks the ripcord. The bike roars to life and Russle hops on. His chubby thumb depresses the throttle and the moped propels his fat-ass off into the night. I can only shake my head as I struggle to shout an apology, but it doesn’t come.
I eventually am able to force myself to my feet and over to the knocked-out junkie-clown.
“C’mon, Switches. -Time to get up. We gotta get back to the room before someone calls the cops on us.” I say as I nudge his slack face with the toe of my shoe. He responds with a bleary eyed look of concern, before violently vomiting allover himself and passing out again.
“Goddamnit, guy.” I mutter to myself. I reach down and grab him by his armpits. I yank him up to his feet. He’s trying to say something but only manages a slobbering moan of disapproval. I drag him to the opening of the van and shove him backward into it.
“Get in. I’m gonna shut the doors, so no one can see you.” I say as I fight to get his legs all the way in. Switches resists me and I sock him in the balls with a solid punch. He vomits a bunch more, but I am able to close the doors. “We are the Champions” is on the radio as I start to fade into unconsciousness myself. My eyes catch the time on my watch just before the sleep catches hold. 3:23am.
4:05am
The sound of the van-door being kicked open shocks me out of the intoxicated slumber. Switches is standing just outside the van. He is lucid and clear-eyed somehow. I’m still completely wrecked.
“You heading up to the room?” I ask sleepily.
“Shut your fucking mouth and get out of the van.” he says. His tone is totally different, though. It really throws me off and I squint to make sure I am seeing who I think I’m seeing.
“Switches? You ok, man?” I say as I try to blink away the grogginess.
“Switches isn't here. Now get out of the van or I’m gonna blow noodles out of your fucking head.” The demon wearing Switches’ body like a suit pulls a handgun from the back of the rainbow pants. He points it at me and the world sharpens a bit as adrenaline is flushed into my brain.
“Wha-Fuck-Sure. Don’t shoot. -Whatever you say. Just don’t shoot.” I say while holding my hands up in surrender. The demon nods and directs me out of the van.
“We’re gonna go in here and get the keys, you do exactly what I tell you to do. You get me?” he says as he grabs me by the arm and walks me across the parking lot.
“Ye-Yea. I gotcha.” I say desperately. We walk into the lobby and I watch as he drags the lady from behind the counter and yanks her across and slams her head into the tiled floor. Blood sprays from the top of her skull like a shattered jar of strawberry jelly. He pounds the butt of the handgun onto the cash register and it spits it’s drawer open. He stuffs fists of cash into his clown-pants.
I look at him in complete disbelief. I mean, Switches has never been a good guy. He’s a goddamned fiend and an asshole, but fucking hell. He just killed this woman like it was nothing.
The demon cuts a keycard from her pants belt-loop with a folding knife. He flips the open sign off, shuts off the lobby lights and locks the doors.
“Switches, what the fuck is going on? I gotta get outta here, dude. I can’t do this. You just fuckin’ split that woman’s head open like a cantaloupe!” I plead to him.
“I told you. Switches isn’t here. God is. Now shut up before I open your face up with this knife.” He says while showing me the blade of the knife. He directs me up the stairs. He stops me as we pass the first door.
“When I open this door, we’re going in and you’re gonna help me find all the money. I don’t want anything but cash and credit cards.” He says as he slides the keycard into the door-handle.
He gently eases the door open and directs me inside with the knife. Once inside, in a room nearly identical in layout to Switches’ upstairs, we find a man, a woman and a little boy. -All passed out in the king-sized bed. I watch as God creeps through the darkness over to the unsuspecting family. He swiftly pounds the knife into the sleeping face of the man. The man is jolted awake by his own brutal murder. He gasps and gags on blood before stuttering into an epileptic fit as God’s knife is repeatedly fired into his brain. The man’s death-throes awaken the woman and child. They are startled and try and escape, but God lunges onto the woman. He stabs her to death. The child cries in fear from under the covers. God stands and approaches the whimpering bundle of covers. He pauses before launching a tirade of knife punctures into the covered child. The knife begins making a sloshing, squishing sound with every gut-wrenching thrust. Eventually, all is quiet. God turns to me. I’m sobbing uncontrollably, but somehow still together enough to follow him.
“Find the goddamned money.”
We find just over $400 and 3 credit cards between the two of us. After the cash and cards have been shoved into his pockets, he ushers me back out into the hall. He pulls the door closed behind himself and turns to the next door.
“Same thing. You know the drill now. So, don’t drag your goddamned feet.” He growls as he slips the master-card into the door-lock.
We do this over and over. Families... whole goddamned families are gutted and beheaded and disemboweled and bled-out. Room after room after room. Murder everyone inside then, find all the money. By 7:30 am the sun is coming up outside and we have wiped out every room in the hotel. –Like 60 rooms. God’s pockets are spilling over with money and he is stuffing more into a quite large duffle-bag. I have cried my goddamned eyes out. By now, I am a callous robot, just doing whatever I gotta do to stay alive. My hands and arms are covered in blood from rifling through dead people’s clothes. God is drenched in crimson and visibly exhausted from this gauntlet of murder.
“Give me your phone.” He says to me as we make our way back down to the lobby. He dials a number and holds it to his sticky ear.
“We’re ready for you.” He says before tossing the bloody phone back to me.
We make our way out to the rape-van and God tells me to get into the passengers seat. He occupies the drivers’ and we wait. After only a moment, a pickup truck pulls in next to us. A dark-haired woman gets out and walks up to God’s window. God leans out and kisses her. He hands her the engorged duffle-bag.
“Make the bet. I’ll see you after the fight.” He says. She smiles and blows him a kiss as she turns to leave.
God cranks up the van.
“We’ve got to get to the arena. I’ve got some old friends to see.” He says before twisting the knob of the radio.
“Another one Bites the Dust” roars from the speakers as we pull out of the parking lot.
SWITCHES THE CLOWN: {Hey, fruity-booty, I’m in town and lookin’ ta get all goofed-up and party an’ shit.}
YOU: {Sure, bro. Where you wanna meet up?}
SWITCHES THE CLOWN: {I’m at the SuperDooper Hotel on 6th and SunPeach. Room 25b. Bring drugs.}
YOU: {Lol I’ll see what I can do. See ya in an hour.}
SWITCHES THE CLOWN: {Bizzle Dizzle, Jizzle}
YOU: {What?}
SWITCHES THE CLOWN: {It’s just something I say. Like that Snoop Dog stuff.}
YOU: {ok}
YOU: {bizzle dizzle}
I hadn’t talked to Switches for almost a year. He had showed up at my 2nd floor bedroom window at 2:30 in the morning. –Scared the fuck out of me. -Partly because I had seen him kill himself up on live tv and partly because it was a fuckin’ wild-eyed junkie-clown staring at me from my bedroom window in the middle of the fucking night. That was a year ago and we only got to talk for a few minutes. I had so many questions, but he was way out of it and could only seem to talk about how there was a serial-killer living in his brain. So, I obviously had to drop everything and hang out. I jumped in the shower, suited up, grabbed my notebook and headed out the door. My dealer was out-of-pocket, but said he could meet up with me at the hotel in a little bit. I was knocking on room 25b at 1:30am.
Switches whips the door open and greets me with wide-eyes of drug-fueled horror. His face is ragged with week-old clown make-up, dried blood and a coke’stache under his nose. There’s a tv on behind him blaring white noise at full volume. He shoves his head out past the door-frame and looks down the hall with quickness and feverish intensity. He grabs my collar and yanks me inside, before slamming the door closed.
“Get in here!-Were you followed? –Did you bring drugs!?” the junkie clown spewed words at me all strung together in one breath.
“Hey, man! My guy said he could come by here, if that’s ok.” I replied as I dismounted my camera-bag onto the foot of the hotel bed.
“Sure. Sure. He’s cool though right?” Switches inquires as he latches the door lock and presses his eye onto the peephole.
“Yea, he’s cool. No worries. How ya been? What have ya been up to?” I say as I flip the television off. The room is suddenly quiet.
Switches doesn’t immediately answer and continues his eye-raping of the peephole.
“Switches?” I interject.
The junkie-clown turns away from peep-hole and falls against the door. He exhales in a bit of relief. He looks at me for the first time and smiles widely.
“Tommy B! Old friend! It’s been too long. Come here and give me a handshake or a high-five or somethin’” he says while raising the roof with his dirty clown-gloved hands. I opt for the fist-bump and he blows-it with some sort of half-handshake: half-fistbump: half arm-grab hybrid thing that nobody does.
“What’s on the agenda for the night?” I ask as he moves over to the cheap chair and round-table in the corner of the room. The table is riddled with trash, pill and liquor bottles, as well as a smearing of unidentified whitish powders.
“I figured we’d get all goofed up and you’d call up some whores or we could take a run at the sluts down at the hotel bar?” Switches says before shoving a bunch of bottles and trash off the table and onto the floor.
Before I can answer, he opens a ziplock bag and dumps a mixture of loose pills and powder onto the table. “Quick. Let’s do all these drugs.”
The next 20 minutes is a smearing of time and reality as we consume the narcotics. Fast-forward to us downstairs, “all turnt up”, and at the bar ordering a couple of jager-bombs. Unfortunately, the bar-sluts weren't biting tonight as they were nowhere to be seen. Apparently, the skeezy bar in the lobby of the illustrious SooperDooper hotel isn't the hip-joint that we presumed it to be. Switches and I were the only patrons left at around 2:30am on a Sunday morning. The barkeep hustles us out the door after our 3rd round. We shuffle out into the parking lot and sit with our legs hanging out of the back of Switches’ rape-van listening to Queen.
“When I heard that the WcF was going to be in town, I should have known you’d be with them.” I say looking out into the night.
“Shit, I haven’t wrestled for them in years, man. I didn't even know they were here. Motherfuckers still owe me money. I should haul up in there and bitch-slap Lerch and get my fuckin’ money, yo.” Switches says while fishing his fist into his pocket, looking for whatever.
“What brings you to Phoenix, then?” I ask.
“Beats me, man. I woke up here this morning. I was in Arkansas yesterday. Been having these… episodes. -Weird shit. The devil’s in my head, ya know. –And he’s been doing stuff when I’m passed out.” The clown says as he pulls a crack-pipe from his rainbow pants.
“Fuckin’ crazy, man.” I reply. It’s hard to get a read on this guy. Is he fucking with me with this “devil in my head” shit? My phone vibrates in my pocket and I see that Russle, my dealer, is heading my way.
“My dealer is on his way. I’m gonna tell him to meet us out here.” I say while I smear my fingers across the face of my phone.
“Sure… hell yea… more drugs, please.” Switches murmurs as he sags backward and lies on the floor of the rape-van.
He exhales a plume of crack-smoke and giggles for a minute. “Radio-Gaga” chirps out of the van’s speakers and Switches giggles along with it. About three songs later, I can see Russle turning into the parking lot. He’s riding a piece of shit, moped. Russle is a sloppy 300lbs, easy, and the moped absolutely hates it. Russle waves to me and almost busts his ass as the moped suddenly veers sharply to the left. Russle straightens it out at the last moment and safely parks directly in front of us.
“Sup, fellas.” Russle chirps as he unbuckles the scuffed yellow helmet from his unkempt afro’ish hairdo.
Switches groans loudly as he uprights himself and stands up out of the van.
“You got drugs? Crack? PCP? Mexican Lip-Snips?” Switches comes on strong to toward Russle.
Russle is startled by Switches and stumbles, letting his moped flop to the cement.
“Whoa there, man! What the fuck, Tommy? Who is this guy?” Russle pleads to me while back-stepping from the strung-out clown. I try to grab at Switches’ arm but, I’m fuckin’ wasted.
“He’s cool, man. He’s coo…”
Switches pounds a right cross into Russle’s brown face.
“Gimmie the goddamned drugs!” Switches is clawing at Russle’s pockets furiously. Russle does a kind of spin and hammers Switches across the face with a haymaker. Switches is fired backward and slams ungracefully into the open door of the rape-van. The clown ricochets off the door and onto the pavement. -Instantly snoring from unconsciousness.
“Fuck, man! You called me down here for this bullshit, Tommy!? Fuck you, man! Not cool, dude. Totally, not cool.” Russle chastises me as he lifts his moped and yanks the ripcord. The bike roars to life and Russle hops on. His chubby thumb depresses the throttle and the moped propels his fat-ass off into the night. I can only shake my head as I struggle to shout an apology, but it doesn’t come.
I eventually am able to force myself to my feet and over to the knocked-out junkie-clown.
“C’mon, Switches. -Time to get up. We gotta get back to the room before someone calls the cops on us.” I say as I nudge his slack face with the toe of my shoe. He responds with a bleary eyed look of concern, before violently vomiting allover himself and passing out again.
“Goddamnit, guy.” I mutter to myself. I reach down and grab him by his armpits. I yank him up to his feet. He’s trying to say something but only manages a slobbering moan of disapproval. I drag him to the opening of the van and shove him backward into it.
“Get in. I’m gonna shut the doors, so no one can see you.” I say as I fight to get his legs all the way in. Switches resists me and I sock him in the balls with a solid punch. He vomits a bunch more, but I am able to close the doors. “We are the Champions” is on the radio as I start to fade into unconsciousness myself. My eyes catch the time on my watch just before the sleep catches hold. 3:23am.
4:05am
The sound of the van-door being kicked open shocks me out of the intoxicated slumber. Switches is standing just outside the van. He is lucid and clear-eyed somehow. I’m still completely wrecked.
“You heading up to the room?” I ask sleepily.
“Shut your fucking mouth and get out of the van.” he says. His tone is totally different, though. It really throws me off and I squint to make sure I am seeing who I think I’m seeing.
“Switches? You ok, man?” I say as I try to blink away the grogginess.
“Switches isn't here. Now get out of the van or I’m gonna blow noodles out of your fucking head.” The demon wearing Switches’ body like a suit pulls a handgun from the back of the rainbow pants. He points it at me and the world sharpens a bit as adrenaline is flushed into my brain.
“Wha-Fuck-Sure. Don’t shoot. -Whatever you say. Just don’t shoot.” I say while holding my hands up in surrender. The demon nods and directs me out of the van.
“We’re gonna go in here and get the keys, you do exactly what I tell you to do. You get me?” he says as he grabs me by the arm and walks me across the parking lot.
“Ye-Yea. I gotcha.” I say desperately. We walk into the lobby and I watch as he drags the lady from behind the counter and yanks her across and slams her head into the tiled floor. Blood sprays from the top of her skull like a shattered jar of strawberry jelly. He pounds the butt of the handgun onto the cash register and it spits it’s drawer open. He stuffs fists of cash into his clown-pants.
I look at him in complete disbelief. I mean, Switches has never been a good guy. He’s a goddamned fiend and an asshole, but fucking hell. He just killed this woman like it was nothing.
The demon cuts a keycard from her pants belt-loop with a folding knife. He flips the open sign off, shuts off the lobby lights and locks the doors.
“Switches, what the fuck is going on? I gotta get outta here, dude. I can’t do this. You just fuckin’ split that woman’s head open like a cantaloupe!” I plead to him.
“I told you. Switches isn’t here. God is. Now shut up before I open your face up with this knife.” He says while showing me the blade of the knife. He directs me up the stairs. He stops me as we pass the first door.
“When I open this door, we’re going in and you’re gonna help me find all the money. I don’t want anything but cash and credit cards.” He says as he slides the keycard into the door-handle.
He gently eases the door open and directs me inside with the knife. Once inside, in a room nearly identical in layout to Switches’ upstairs, we find a man, a woman and a little boy. -All passed out in the king-sized bed. I watch as God creeps through the darkness over to the unsuspecting family. He swiftly pounds the knife into the sleeping face of the man. The man is jolted awake by his own brutal murder. He gasps and gags on blood before stuttering into an epileptic fit as God’s knife is repeatedly fired into his brain. The man’s death-throes awaken the woman and child. They are startled and try and escape, but God lunges onto the woman. He stabs her to death. The child cries in fear from under the covers. God stands and approaches the whimpering bundle of covers. He pauses before launching a tirade of knife punctures into the covered child. The knife begins making a sloshing, squishing sound with every gut-wrenching thrust. Eventually, all is quiet. God turns to me. I’m sobbing uncontrollably, but somehow still together enough to follow him.
“Find the goddamned money.”
We find just over $400 and 3 credit cards between the two of us. After the cash and cards have been shoved into his pockets, he ushers me back out into the hall. He pulls the door closed behind himself and turns to the next door.
“Same thing. You know the drill now. So, don’t drag your goddamned feet.” He growls as he slips the master-card into the door-lock.
We do this over and over. Families... whole goddamned families are gutted and beheaded and disemboweled and bled-out. Room after room after room. Murder everyone inside then, find all the money. By 7:30 am the sun is coming up outside and we have wiped out every room in the hotel. –Like 60 rooms. God’s pockets are spilling over with money and he is stuffing more into a quite large duffle-bag. I have cried my goddamned eyes out. By now, I am a callous robot, just doing whatever I gotta do to stay alive. My hands and arms are covered in blood from rifling through dead people’s clothes. God is drenched in crimson and visibly exhausted from this gauntlet of murder.
“Give me your phone.” He says to me as we make our way back down to the lobby. He dials a number and holds it to his sticky ear.
“We’re ready for you.” He says before tossing the bloody phone back to me.
We make our way out to the rape-van and God tells me to get into the passengers seat. He occupies the drivers’ and we wait. After only a moment, a pickup truck pulls in next to us. A dark-haired woman gets out and walks up to God’s window. God leans out and kisses her. He hands her the engorged duffle-bag.
“Make the bet. I’ll see you after the fight.” He says. She smiles and blows him a kiss as she turns to leave.
God cranks up the van.
“We’ve got to get to the arena. I’ve got some old friends to see.” He says before twisting the knob of the radio.
“Another one Bites the Dust” roars from the speakers as we pull out of the parking lot.
