91%

Winter in the Rust Belt. A black bum who even sounds kinda like Gil-Scott rounded a corner, singin’ “And now it’s winter...winter in America...” Case watched him go from a ’97 Park Avenue that they still had the gall to slap David Buick’s name onto, snowed into the lot of the methadone clinic.

Case flicked on the dome light and rummaged through his collection of cassettes in the storage compartment of the center console, which held mostly Killing Joke and Gun Club tapes. He slid The Wipers into his casette player and gunned it on Sofa King blvd. hoping he’d get to the plaza before closing.

Fifteen minutes before the lights went off in the store, he came outta Creedence Clearwater Rental and hocked a VHS copy of Chopping Mall onto the center console between the seats before hustling next door to the Pill Pharm.

Instead of the regular Muzak, Case found himself humming along to Aimee Mann’s “Save Me”, wandering the pharmacy aisles, glancing out the giant store windows every so often as the snow came down harder. He yawned, picked out a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and stood at check out like an idiot, waiting for someone, some pimple-faced larper with zits on his ass, or hefty black woman with all the sass drained out of her by four nappy-headed kids, to show up.

Screw it, he glances both ways, all the check out aisles empty, and wanders up and down the store, from hygene, liquor and cosmetics to hair-care, strap-ons and glow sticks, the joint’s as empty as his gaze when he swallowed a handful of barbital and sat drooling with this dead-eyed stare at the theater screen when he’d gone to see Coyote Ugly a few months back.

The whole time, he kept seeing something dash between the aisles out the corner of his eye, hard to pin down, but maybe like a Mini-Me version of a midget. There it goes again, gone before he can get a look, leavin’ him to imagine the killer dwarf from Don’t Look Now.

Out the window again: everything’s outlined pitch-fucking-clear in winter.

He stopped on a dime and wandered if he should go back to the methodone clinic when he saw the toddler crawling across the ceiling. Case, who even sorta looked like the ginger bloke from Trainspotting when he shaved his head - that, or the cunt from Bronski Beat – tried to ignore it as he rounded another aisle, keeping it in the corner of his eye until it was out of sight. He pictured the cult from Rosemary’s Baby having a gathering in the freezer behind the milk section, then wondered what he was still doing here. His lean, skinny ass still sometimes got the shakes, an’ he starts murmuring the lyrics to ‘I Hate Myself and Want to Die’: “Runny nose and runny yolk, even if you have a cold still, you can cough on me again…” He still had a Vinyl, the cover all battered, of The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience, but whenever he got to the part where Kurt sings “In the someday, what’s that sound?”, he always heard it as “Hey wait, what’s that sound?” and so he’s standing there, in the middle of the main aisle, a real live wire, wire-fuckin’-thin, a picture out of an Elliott Smith song, murmuring to himself, over and over again, “hey wait, what’s that sound?”

An intense electrical humming from the wiring overhead and the fluorescents switch to neon-green, like the pharmacy hold-up in Natural Born Killers, so intense Case shields his eyes.

He marches over to the check out, slippin’ out a crumpled fiver, not knowin’ if it’ll be enough to cover the bottle, an’ he hears a glass POP! behind him. Store lights blowing out all around, glass and sparks showering down like the stadium lights at the end of every goddam baseball movie. He flung down the fiver, not knowing where it landed, and tried the glass door after the automated ones didn’t open. Shit. He whips back in time to see a red-cloaked toddler, maybe a dwarf’s dwarf, tip-toe past, lifting its knees in an exaggerated fashion, Dick Dastardly pose, and outta sight ’round the check out.

“Oh, oh hell no. I ain’t gettin’ Donald Sutherlan’d, not out here in Coogar and Dark’s shit-mart.”

By now there was only the silhouette of outside. Maybe enough light from the blizzard in the lot to stumble over to the glow stick aisle without fuckin’ up his shins too bad.

Case legs it, like a bull in a china shop, Isopropyl back in his grip after it slipped from his clutch and dropped on the floor; by the time he tears open the first pack of rave accessories, his knees and thighs were like that of one of those Mexicans who crawl for a mile on jagged-glass gravel to reach some church.

Tye-dyed and glowing like Ken Kesey’s bus, day-glo rubbed into his tits and glow sticks wrapped from his neck to his dick.

Somethin’s out there, doing the “Engel” whistle, the sound movin’ away and gettin’ closer.

“Like Jaws in a pharmacy aisle”, he mumbles, lookin’ both ways.

Case, like a newborn fawn that’s had its kneecaps broken over a loanshark debt, tentatively steps out from behind the industrial-strength dildo display. Combat roll from shelf to shelf until he has a clear line to the glass. He’s gonna rush it and smash through, like a Jackass version of Dead End Drive-In.

“The snow will pad my fall and numb the pain, that’s what I keep telling myself.”

He was mistaken about it being a toddler - a little Richard D. James munchkin, escaped from the set of the music video for “Come to Daddy”, steps out into his path.

Fuckit. He bum-rushes the unlovable Oompa-Loompa reject, the rubbing alcohol fumbles outta his calcium-depleted Nosferatu-like claws, he trips, slips and head-butts Aphex Twin’s crotch, punting him straight out the window. He scrambles back, swipes up the precious, scrambles over the broken glass and over to his ’97; drops the keys in snow, plucks’em up; chucks the rubbing booze

into shotgun. Come-to-Daddy kicks up snow as he dashes, no, not so much dashes, the drift’s too high to run through, so the dwarf Cossack-kicks it across the lot, reaching for the handle; Case fumbles the stick shift; the English dwarf throws open the passenger side door and Case repeatedly smashes him in the face while wrestling over the medical booze. He picks up the VHS of Chopping Mall and shoves the corner edge of the box into the dwarf’s eye.

The Elephant Man who tried to work for Willy Wonka lets out an angelic techno beat of a scream and schlepps off.

When Case got home, he popped in the tape, muted the TV, cranked up the volume on the club hit of the summer, and bomping ‘L’amour Toujours’ huffed the bottle of 91% while watching and giggling at knock-off Daleks terrorize dumbass ’80’s teens.