Knuckle Balled: Knucklers, #2

My name is RJ, and I’m a drug addict.

Like a shitty Nar-Anon meeting on some preachy episode of TJ Hooker, that’s the way my nightmare always began. My subconscious was forcing me into rehab to face the consequences of my choices. These choices—the ones that resulted in Bait’s death—ate away at my body from the tip of my toes all the way to the longest strand of hair sticking up on my head.

I’m a bad man. I’m a selfish man. Although I’m not technically a vampire, who’s to say that I’m not some form of vampire? By form of vampire I mean a Hail Mary abortion kept alive by a perverted Catholic sect called The Cloth who crossed their arms and shook their heads at my junkie mother’s right to choose.

The fact was this: I was alive. I needed blood… and heroin.

In the dream—which I’m not sure I can call a dream because I’m not technically certain I was asleep—I would find myself planted in the middle of a circle of plastic junior high-quality assembly chairs. The meeting didn’t take place in a junior high, however. It took place in the torched remains of the gymnasium where I was brought to life by way of an incubator, steroids, and a constant drip of narcotics. That was how the lovely cunts at St. Matthews fed me to instill my addiction.

I grabbed tightly onto the chair that seemed to be ass fucking me as I pinched my finger on a screw that was coming loose. It felt like the center of the seat contained a makeshift dildo fabricated from the same uncomfortable plastic utilitarian chair materials as the base.

I cleared my throat, making certain that everyone heard my plea for forgiveness.

Ahem. My name is RJ, and I’m a heroin addict.

Everyone in the circle around me just seemed angry. The dream cast always featured a filthy assortment of assholes and unfortunate collateral damage who had turned my walking abortion life upside down.

To my right was a dirty pig of a man in a Roman Catholic vestment masturbating into the face of a little boy in a sailor outfit as he chugged fetuses from a giant beer stein. To my left was a cracked-out slut who was birthing lifeless children from her gash, one right after another, strung together by umbilical cords as if she were processing macabre sausages.

My conscience had a funny way of grabbing a bullhorn and yelling into my ear, Hey, dickhead, you’re worse than every living and unlikable piece of shit in this room. Remember, this is the room where you were crapped out of your druggie mother’s ass. This is the room where you were sentenced to walk the earth as an unloving and uncaring shell of normality.

I pleaded for acceptance into their cult of sobriety. Still, no one responded. I wanted to be welcomed into their world of the living. Surely I wasn’t as bad as Father McAteer, who was located halfway around the circle, and was much more preoccupied with polishing and placing a diamond ring onto the skeletal finger of his latest victim. I mean, he brought me and all the other abortions in Los Angeles to life because he wanted to stop the mass prostitute abortions on the streets of L.A. That’s pretty bad.

Again.

My name is RJ, and I’m a heroin addict.

I tried to stand up and extract revenge on them for ignoring me. Who were they to sit and judge? I was better than all of them. I didn’t have a problem. Unlike them, I was forced to live like this. I didn’t ask for it. If I had my way, that piece of shit mother of mine would have shoved a vacuum up her twat and sucked me out before I fell into the care of McAteer and The Cloth.

How dare they look down their noses at me. Sure, I’ve killed several hundred humans, including half-vampire people. So what? And yeah, sometimes I killed people for the fun of it, but mostly I killed because I needed that sweet warm nectar in their bodies. I needed to stay alive… and get high. Killer or victim? Which one was I? After literally crawling out of a dumpster in my teens, the only way for me to stay alive was to feed my hunger.

My hunger… my everything… my loving heroin… the only love of my sad half-life.

The itches and sweats intensified as they continued to ignore me. I felt so debilitated in the dream that I vomited cotton balls, then tried to pound them back into my corroded mouth with my fist.

Ashamed.

I was ashamed of my existence. Not even those derelicts who sat on their high horses would get the chance to point and laugh at what was left of me. Broken into a thousand pieces of waste on the inside and filled to the brim with darkness, regret, and sadness. That was what was left of RJ Reynolds. Badass vampire, heroin addict, gangster motherfucker.

I got your back, a baritone whisper vibrated my ear drum.

I turned to see King Cobra standing next to me. His voice was warped by one of those awful steel collars that The Cloth used to control us when we were in captivity. It was just a week ago, but it felt like years. They forced us to eliminate all the other vampire gangs in L.A. I escaped the vise of the collar. Cobra didn’t.

I wanted to tell him how much he meant to me. He was the biggest threat to my drug dealing operation and I despised his fascist rule of the streets. Thing was, I never got the chance to enjoy the alliance we formed after we were kidnapped by The Cloth because—

"Adstringo gutter!" A voice screamed from the other side of me.

Because that happened.

The dream and the wish of getting the chance to spend more time with King Cobra left me as the collar tightened and squeezed the contents of his head out all over my shoulder.

I knew who spoke The Cloth’s magic phrase. It was The Habit: the awful teenybopper actress who had outlived her appeal, turned heroin addict and then nun mercenary for a pack of vampire exterminators.

She lifted her repulsive nun’s habit— "It’s a habit. Get it RJ? —and started fingering herself. Small fetuses dropped to her filthy toes. I know you want to get inside this shit."

There might have been a time when I wanted to fuck her, but that was long ago. Mostly I wanted to keep off the streets by living in her heroin den. Now even that house was gone.

Too bad none of you vampire scum can get a hard-on, she reminded me.

That was the truth. A lot of us cheated the fact that we didn’t have enough blood in our bodies to get aroused by using a syringe full of blood and some crushed up Viagra.

She limped away into the dark, leaving a trail of unborn babies in her wake.

And then, just as I stood up and was about to grab an arm bong and my rig and leave those dreadful monsters, another familiar voice rang out like a news story sound bite from a murder scene.

She’s dead, motherfucker. I kept her alive because I knew you’d be back. I wanted you to see me kill her, you piece of shit.

I sat down and closed my eyelids. I didn’t want to look up and see who was sitting across from me in the circle of horrible creatures. I told myself it was only a stupid dream. But the voice fought louder than my attempts to reel myself back to reality. It spelled out my greatest failure. It reminded me of the worst thing that I had ever done that sat on top of a mountain of blood-drained corpses. The failure waved a flag from atop its mountain and insisted that there would never be a way to correct this wrong. It was beyond a lack of judgment. It was beyond taking the left path to damnation rather than the right one toward salvation. It could never be fixed and it could never be rewritten. It was worse than taking human life for pleasure.

With my head down, I sat there and debated whether or not to further confront the demons that I conjured up. For some reason, all I could think about was killing that lump of human feces to my right—the pedophile priest—and sucking what was left of his barren existence from his knuckles. After all, that was my justification for killing pimps, gangsters, child molesters, and the accumulated dirt on the streets of Los Angeles. Wasn’t it? They didn’t have any right to live.

A rat scurried by my bare feet. Rather than looking up and facing myself in a mirror of misery, I watched it circle around my legs in a figure eight. I refused to give any further attention to the pedophile or the welfare check assembly line on the other side of me. And I definitely didn’t want to catch a glimpse of the horror tragedy across the room from me that I had created. I snatched up the rat. Trying not to draw attention to myself, I rolled open my leather syringe case with my calloused heel. Using my big toe and broken and bent second toe, I clinched onto a needle’s plunger and pulled it out of the case. With my other foot, I exchanged direction. The toxin gleamed a strawberry milkshake color, a sign that it contained both heroin and blood. The vermin dug his fangs into the meeting point of my thumb and index finger. I flicked him in the face with my other hand. I didn’t want him dead before I bit into his hairy spine like a snack cake.

He released his teeth just as my left foot—accompanied by the vessel brimming with my eternal love—slid up my inner thigh. Slowly, I grabbed the syringe with my hand. The rat looked up at me with his dingleberry-sized eyes. He knew what was coming. He could see a cloud of death rolling into the decrepit assemblage taking place in the gymnasium that he called home. From the corner of my eye, I caught a peek of the yellow caution tape that guarded my birth secrets and the evidence that The Cloth had committed crimes in the eyes of their God. It reminded me that, like it was for that rat, this was my home.

Starving for a fix, I pulled back on the plunger and dragged my now wet tongue across my dehydrated and busted lips. The rat squirmed for a second. Then, he stopped, looked up at me and gave up.

From across the circle, I heard another familiar voice. It was the voice of my conscience again, only this time it had the tone of thirteen-year-old runaway and wannabe prostitute, Bailia Jenkins. Bait.

Make me like you. It was the voice of my failure. I finally looked up. Bite my neck. She pleaded with me. You can make me live forever. You’re a vampire.

I dropped the rat and the scag, looking away from her. As the lights dimmed in the room and the horde of wrongdoers—the NA equivalent of the Legion of Doom—collected their kids, their hatchets, their fetus-shooters, and slung bronzed baby shoes around their necks, I lifted my head again and saw the truth. My truth.

In front of me was a sneering Dez, lightly patting another me on the head as if I had just inched out a win at a spelling bee. I was the one who saved him from the streets when he was left at the dump by the fucking priests. And he repaid me by taking away the closest connection to humanity that I ever had, the cure for my loneliness and pain. In the arms of my duplicate, in my other mouth, and literally all over the other me was what was left of Bait. I didn’t know whether Dez killed Bait out of jealousy or if he, like almost all the creatures like us, was indifferent to the lives of humans.

It didn’t make sense to fully blame him for killing Bait. He may have tortured her and delivered the final blow, but I was just as much to blame for bringing her into my wreckage. If I could have bitten her neck and brought her back to life, I would have. The fact is, that was just romantic fiction, and no matter how many times I told her that I didn’t have any miraculous powers beyond my super strength, fast healing, and sensitive hearing, she refused to believe me.

For some reason, I stood up from my uncomfortable nightmare chair and walked across the circle to the welcoming arms of the traitor, Dez. I bent down in front of him and the other me. Then I shared in the feast of the thirteen-year-old girl who taught what it meant to feel alive.

The buzzing of a prepaid cell phone that Eldritch picked up for me at a 7-Eleven woke me. It vibrated against my face and dusted up some pebbles on the balmy Texas asphalt where I guess I had passed out. We had spent a few days on the run, hiding out in abandoned buildings around the outskirts of Austin, and it was enough to force anyone into an alley for a nap. You’d never know when you’d find something comforting like a pissed-on throw pillow that lived a second life beyond the giveaway bin at the local Salvation Army.

I scrapped some eye boogers off my lashes and yawned. Coming off of half a week on poor man—Eldritch’s fun time concoction of Rottweiler blood, eighty percent meth and twenty percent heroin—was an unmatched spiral to the bottom of the heap. That is, of course, when the buzzing paranoia and face-picking turns the corner to exhaustion. I looked at the phone display.

Where are you?!?!?!?! Are you still on 6th? You’ve been in that alley for over an hour!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m not sure if I could see clearly enough to process all the exclamation and question marks at the end of his text. However, I was sure his intention was to convey a sense of urgency that he normally reserved for the editors who spew out his dick-suck-worthy acting reels and his crack team of antique furniture delivery men who couldn’t seem to get that unique, Eighteenth Century armoire to his ten-thou-a-month Bat Cave quickly enough.

Trying to keep my two-ton eyelids open long enough to grab the handset with my post-amphetamine shake fest jumping bean hands, I wrote back.

Fuck you. Taking a nap.

I scratched at the crown of my head; I came up with a handful of dead hair rather than relief. The phone buzzed again.

Good God, man. Need I remind you that for every hourglass grain that passes, constables are running Amber Alerts on television!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The over-use of exclamation on the second text made me dizzy. I propped myself up from my fetal meth position and sucked in the hot, polluted air of Austin. I tried to shake my eyes straight and the refuse in my hair loose. That was a mistake. Immediately, I found my head between my bent legs, hurling up the single-serve bag of Peperoni Pizza Combos that I swiped from a gas station during my ill-fated journey through the streets of this white-trash knockoff of Los Angeles. The only real difference between this asshole of a town and the cesspool of my formative years is hipster, indie ball-licking music taking center stage in front of the washed-up whores-turned-DJs that I had become accustomed to. Oh, and of course the fact that street people in Austin were lowered to wearing the secondhand fashion statements of two years ago that the Lost Angel pricks delivered as care packages to brighten the hopes of the excrement that filled the streets of South by Southwest.

I had been so totally out of it since we left California—stopping only in Peoria, Arizona to take care of some business involving a child molester and his accepting wife—that I didn’t really have time to pull myself through the pain of downtown Shitville. To Austin’s credit, it was a lot like Silverlake and Los Feliz. The same D-bags exchanged their cardigan sweaters for knit caps and ironic Donkey Kong wristbands. As if my confessional nightmare wasn’t crummy enough, it was followed by waking up in the center of an aiming-low star fucker nirvana.

Playing to my predicament, I tried to get all the speedy, rancid bile out of my stomach. Luckily for me, the delicious pretzel outer shell of the Combos provided my tongue with flavor and my throat with buffer.

A hand tugged on my shoulder.

Hey, friend. You okay?

I picked out a piece of Combo stuck between my teeth with my tongue and spit it onto his custom, limited edition Adidas. That was when I noticed his shirt. It said Funky Cold Medina.

Really, dude? I blurted out like a fortified wine-drenched vagrant. ’Funky Cold Medina’? That’s the best you could do?

Whatever, you piece of shit, he said as he threw a handful of loose change in my face.

The phone buzzed again, causing it to shake off my knee and onto the ground. I picked it up as my vision crossed planes between blurry and borderline dyslexia-like symptoms. Before I took the time to focus on the new message, I realized why Eldritch was quiet for a few moments. It wasn’t because he wanted me to collect my thoughts or get my shit together. Rather, he wanted to produce a manifesto detailing our situation in flowery Shakespearian dialect.

I closed my left eye because it was agitated by the LED-lit display and held the phone in path with a street light. As if that made any sense or resulted in any difference whatsoever. It read:

No response? That is what could be expected from a shrewd individual of your character. As the sun creeps up on us such as the plague of our fathers, you have simply forgotten the situation you have delivered onto us. My trusted carriage…

I think he was taking about his retarded hearse…

…is the suspected kidnappers and killers’ transportation. If you cannot commandeer a more formidable mode of transportation, then I must no longer participate in your folly of misguided and dangerous actions. Simply stated, I will be leaving you to your own devices and dropping off the child at the nearest constable house. In an agreement we made, you promised full participation in helping to veil us from those who find us the despicable demons who took the lives of an innocent suburban couple and abducted their sole living offspring. Am I incorrect to expect your aid? Please advise on your progress and respond with due diligence. Regretfully, if your complete participation in this matter is met with tom foolery, then I am out of—

His fancy pants words strung together as a blob of nonsense, but it was all too obvious that he was preoccupied with the kid to finish his text, to which I replied:

Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Bad English.

One. Two. Three.

Just get the fucking car, RJ.

I hadn’t really seized the opportunity to laugh at myself in recent weeks, so I took a second, licked the barf off the back of my teeth and giggle a little. I slid my drained body up a brick wall and typed.

On it.

Eldritch was right about one thing. The night was coming to end. As SXSW scenesters started stumbling out of their new favorite clubs where they discovered their new favorite bands, I inched along the sidewalks, being bounced around like a racquetball by drunken, coked-out corduroy.

My path drove me further and further from the action. I needed to find a less conspicuous vehicle than the overwhelming lot of refurbished rockabilly posers’ classic Ford pickup trucks and roadsters that lined the afterhours parking spots on 6th Street. Beyond that, I needed to find something more practical for two people essentially allergic to sunlight and a pre-teen girl, who, unfortunately, needed to be tied up and gagged.

Kind of a funny thing about me saving Bait’s little sister, Pinball, from the atrocities of the doublewide where she grew up is that she only understood what she saw. Acting on nothing but vengeance for her sister, I didn’t make a good first impression on her. As a matter of fact, our introduction was the ripping apart of her stepfather and mother. In other words, I was the monster who killed her loving parents and took her away from her life.

You can never know how a child interprets abuse. Maybe my victims, Thomas the child rapist and his glutton of a wife, told her they did what they did out of love. It was either that or she simply couldn’t differentiate between having a middle-aged man’s testicles in her mouth and getting a loving hug for doing well in school. So, if me being a monster in the eyes of a child for the time being meant that Pinball didn’t end up as burnt pieces in the remains of a meth lab in the Salton Sea like her sister… then so be it.

Despite my recommendation to leave her in Peoria, Eldritch insisted that we take her with us. I don’t know why. The last thing that I wanted was another kid to worry about and take care of.

My knees popped as I stopped at the window of an electronics store and took a good look at myself.

I don’t think I know you, I said to my reflection.

My bushy mess of a hairdo shot out sideways, overgrown at my ears. It was still kind of blonde, but all of the blood and dirt that clumped onto it since I last showered at Eldritch’s loft in Los Angeles just made it look like someone sprayed shit on my head every morning. Even worse, the hair acted as lights leading into a landing strip that drew all attention to the drooping and bagged craters that contained my eyes. The eyes were sometimes blue and sometimes green. Rarely did others get the opportunity to gaze into my peepers—my best quality—because my pupils were constantly dilated. So, if I ever had to describe myself to anyone, I would play it safe and say I had black and red eyes. The older I got, the more my cheekbones tended to push at the bags. It was a constant fight between what seemed to be living material and the death spreading across the center of my face.

I dug around the edges of my nose with my index finger and my thumb. My large nostrils were so dry that the flakey skin created a path of irritation right into the top of my lips, which seemed to have a constant cut near the middle of the top. I curled my lip and threw my arms over my head, doing my best imitation of Billy Idol. I quietly wailed like Billy but came up embarrassingly short; my Rebel Yell was more of a Careless Whisper. My boney arms dropped to my sides and I slapped on my atrophy-mutated belly. The drugs tore down our bodies but combined with blood, they helped us live. The body was just a shell in a constant state of hyperkinetic rejuvenation. Unfortunately, my organs didn’t self-build muscle, but they never stopped layering bandages on top of bandages.

I bent over to a puddle by my feet, wiped the sewage across my face and the stood up again to look at the piece of shit that stared back at me. The water was refreshing but did little to mask my junkie features. At that point in my life as a career degenerate, I could dip my face in paint and make cool Misfits’ shirts. I dragged my tongue across the roof of my mouth that was coated with yuck mouth plaque. I licked some scum water off my cheek and tried to swoosh it around. I guessed my breath was always shit.

I stuck out my tongue. It was bumpy and blue as if it was the first thing that a couple of wisecracking TV detectives noticed after I had been fished out of the wharf. It matched the color of various unseen parts of my body, like my armpits or the raw area on the insides of my thighs around my balls.

I slapped on the stomach a few times and then spit out the sludge I used as mouthwash. Then, I stretched my neck closer to the electronics store and smiled into the window. My teeth were fucked up. The naturally crooked, street-cultivated ivories struggled to stay attached to the root. The years of drugs had browned each of them around the gum line and cracked them around the rim in back. If I licked my teeth, I could feel the broken-down damage and poverty of being a gross addict. On top of that, I was a grinder when I slept. So, the irony of being a vampire with teeth that could barely break down a piece of steak was never lost on me. It was my reality, and it wasn’t like I could swing by a dentist’s office, even if I had the money or insurance to do so.

I bobbed my head back and forth and lifted up my ratty t-shirt as I started dragging my hand up my torso. My fingers wobbled in and out of my ribs that stuck out in weird places. I did have the power to heal but nothing ever grew back perfectly. Wherever there was a break at some point in my life, there were little balls that ranged in size from BBs to golf balls. Like I said before, my body was comprised of bandages layered over bandages. If something broke, it would tie itself off like a water balloon or sprinkle a little glob of superglue onto the fracture. My body never finished the job by sanding over protrusions so jagged edges and bumps were common.

I knew my body was torn up, but I had no noticeable scars. The only plus of being a vampire—or an aborto-fiend—was the healing part. The sensitive hearing was kind of useless. The super strength was cool, but it wasn’t like any of us used our powers for good. As a whole, at least judging from the things like me that I had met, we were pretty much a society of psychotic boobs.

It had been a long time since I looked at myself, so I pulled my shirt over my head and inched even closer to the window to see if I could catch a glimpse at any remaining ink from my Faction Batman tattoo. It was eroded off of my chest by acid when I was kidnapped by those awesome Catholic priests that always seemed to guest star in my nightmares. No dots of ink or even a scar remained. I rubbed at the section where it used to be over my heart, maybe hoping that some skin was covering it up. Stupid, really. According to Cobra, The Cloth did me a favor by removing it from my body. At the very least, no more Batman or vampire/bat jokes for the rest of my life. I certainly wasn’t going to replace it. All that said, being semi-bulletproof didn’t beat being covered in a bunch of scars. The scars on the inside hurt worse and didn’t look as cool.

I pulled my shirt back down and tried to pull myself out of my hypnosis by hopping up and down a few times. My actions caused my dick to jump in my