Recently in BELLEVUE MENTAL HOSPITAL Category

THE SHUFFLER.

I did make one friend in the Bellevue Mental Hospital. His name was Neighbor Wes. We boys spent time getting fucked up like stereo fuck up types. I found a copy of a disc by a band named Beast Fister. I gave the audio gift to Neighbor Wes upon our first encounter this morning.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s a fucking CD,” I said.
“I know I know,” Neighbor Wes barked. “But what the fuck is it for?”
“A how do you do gift.”
“Oh yeah?”
The right hand of the gothic child with silver barbell slashed through his sight divider by the name Neighbor Wes, stuck out his left hand, palm up, revealing a sizable portion of uncut cocaine.

“How the fuck do you do!” Wes said with a bang!
“Nice trick,” I smiled as my hands reached for the white.
“I love that trick, I love all tricks. I know tons of tricks. When I was younger I did tricks until the cops came.”
“How nice.”
“Yes, and I love pussy. My tongue will eat any slab of female ham. Gothic, punk, cherry, hairy, any squishy on the menu will do. If you see hot bitches, send them my way.”
“You’ll probably be swarmed then,” I said, “because a romantic such as myself is constantly in search of nothing more than what you would call a hot bitch.”
“Then we’ll get along fine, just fine,” Neighbor Wes said, saluting me like a captain.
“Let’s white our noses and blast heavy metal.”
Mirror, razor, Black Sabbath and a sack of magic-devil cocaine.

“You wanna play gin rummy? I’m so great at this game. And, I’m a real gnarly shuffler,” Wes said as he failed to properly mix my Baby Animals of Washington cards. “No paper. No points,” Wes said. “I don’t want anything to do with paper or points. Only losers keep track of victories.”
“You can only have ten cards at one time,” I reminded the game’s newest genius player. “And you must have a run and three of a kind.”
“I goddamn already know, ok? I know.”
The fuzzy pals pictured on the backside of those Baby Animals of Washington cards were bears black (two), raccoon mother and small black-eyed babes (one) and (three), bald eagle (one), lioness napping on sleepy baby cubs (one) and (three), and other. Other is not a misspelling of the word otter. I mean other. Could have been a Muppet-wildcat supreme combo beast, for all I know.
“Hey I got the joker,” Wes cheered. “I win I win. I’m the bestest Neighbor Westest!”
“No you moron. That joker is a sign meticulously placed in your hand by the gods. There is no luck for you this afternoon. I am speaking to a lost soul.”
Wes bought my bait with cold hard cash. The black haired kiddo laid an eight of diamonds on me. I was holding a young pair of seven/eight spades with big jack spade waiting for the nine. I pretended to flip the diamond eight around, as if I might have wanted it, then I snatched from the deck. It was my nine, the love patty for my mighty spade sandwich. I discarded and waited. Wes laid down his cards. I saw pairs, pairs and no runs. “Go fish,” Wes smiled.
“Dude.”
I just explained the rules to him.
“I just explained the rules to you.”
He wasn’t listening. No one is ever listening.
“Its your discard,” I told Wes.
We tossed a few good volleys until Wes purposely smeared the stillness of the old maid pile. I lost it a little bit.
“Bro! The old maid pile must remain perfectly neat so we can avoid those wonderful cards we chose not to hold onto,” I explained. Sometimes cards are like women.
“I know how to play,” Wes said. “I invented all games. You don’t know. And don’t tell me what to do.”
“Shut your shit up,” I said. “You’re ruining my rummy high.”
“Oh shit,” Neighbor Wes said, looking amazed by the reflection of his insufficient hand. “I only have nine cards. Aren’t I supposed to have thirteen?”
Shots of games repeat impossible chaos in HD sound around the brain theater of Neighbor Wes as if he were a deaf pinball wiz.
“Who the fuck taught you this game bro?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Wes said with a shrug.
“Tell me, so I can kick in their nigger shin plates!”
“HEAVY METAL,” Wes said as he exploded into a fifty-two pickup fit.
“Don’t kill the animals.” I hollered.
Wes and me began to zing the cards at each other with coked up tenacity. Zap! An ace of clubs caught Neighbor Wes on the cheek. “Score for me,” I celebrated as the boomerang joker that I dealt Wes earlier hit me in the tit. I flung it. It hit.
“My eye,” screamed Wes. “I think you caught me in the eye.”
“How the hell do you not know?”
“I wasn’t looking,” the kid tells me.
“Do you remember what card it was?”
“Black I think.”
“Was it shaped like a spade or a club?”
“Which one is the club again?”
“It’s the clover.”
“Then why don’t they call it a clover?”
“Did a clover card hit you?”
“No. It was a heart.”
Neighbor Wes and Auggie Joust spent the rest of that day sniffing plentiful lines of white. Him licking the mirror like last tastes of supper. Me typing out my life into print about how I took her breath and buried it into a novella.
“Are you still writing about that Merlin?”
“Arwinne.”
“Same thing. Just different that’s all.”
“She appears to send me off the edge.”
“Who wants to be on the edge anyway?”
I saw his point and saw him point to the unsniffed cocaine.
With a smile greater than the Grand Canyon my teeth, lips, nose, eyes, face blasted into the mound of dirt. Eventually I came up for air. Head titled back as fingers wiped nostrils clean of evidence. Down fell a backwash of blood as it spilled from my nose and down like a backwash of blood. What a wave.
“Holy fun,” Neighbor Wes screams as he leaped onto the mattress, licking the blood from my dying nose.
“You vampire,” I yelled.
“I saw blood so I reacted. What do you want from me? I’m kurrazzee!” Wes spun his index finger against the temple of his gothic head, buzzing and humming like a bee under your shirt.
Kid had a point and a pint of my blood in his gut.
“Dude,” I says to Wes. “Cut the shit and help me catch this boomerang broad.”
“Her, who?”
“That Arwinne.”
“I love boomerangs. I can beat anyone. I know how to throw them things and everything.”
“She creeps into my writing like a beautiful Kafka bug.”
“You should just stop writing what you think you know about her,” Wes says, “and start losing your mind over the dirt I am going to expose about her.” Wes reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a small photograph. He hands me the shot. “That’s her,” he says.
“Her, who?” I whimsically retorted.
“That’s Arwinne!”
“Yes motherfucker yes.”
I grabbed the picture like a bleacher creature foul ball. “Arwinne,” my eyes kept repeating, as I studied her features like a test I finally wanted to ace. Wes checked her looks, then she finally knocks him out.
“I know this baby,” he says.
“You shut your mouth.”
“No joke,” he said. “She stays in cell 105.”
“She’s a patient?”
“Very mental.”
“Well how do you do?”
Neighbor Wes was a natural born gossiper.
“I saw chicky d on Pine Street with some kiddo.”
“Kiddo who?”
“Kiddo is a major yo-yo.”
I wanted answers like I wanted another strip of powder goodness so I leaned down and snorted aborted my brain on the giant mirror. When I came up I began to say something but soon my mouth was full of blood and the gothic ghoul Neighbor Wes comes leaning in to lick my nose.
“Dude!”
“What’s the deal with blood?” Wes said. “I mean, they should just call it red, am I wrong?”
“Don’t start.”
“Ouch I’m redding,” Wes said. “But when you red, you aren’t reading some stupid book, you are actually bleeding iron enriched red, which, like the commercials should say, ‘does a body good.’"
“Cut it out.”
“Red is the new blood America. Get ready!”
“Stop the insanity,” I screamed. My chest thumped like dynamite. I was seconds from spontaneously combusting.
“Sampling makes connoisseurs of us all,” Wes smiled.
“Goddamnit Neighbor Wes! You tell me and you tell me now what the mucky muck you saw that Arwinne doing and with whom or so help me the force of Buddha’s palm, I will take my shoes and beat you over the head with them.”
“Those shoes?” Wes pointed to the brand new kicks I was currently rocking, violet turquoise boys on each of my feet.
“Heavens no. These are my good shoes that you wish I would hit you with. These were stripped off a real mannequin and purchased in a real store. Not these buster.” I walked back to my closet and grabbed the pair. They were worn out. I showed him his future adversary.
“Oh alright,” he says. “But you didn’t hear it from me.
“Give it to me straight Neighbor Wes, and hold nothing back. I am a man who can take anything.”

CHIZZLE RHODES | 6

CHA CHA LOUNGE.

Fuckjaw of the street circuit Neighbor Wes painted the excruciatingly painful face of a kiddo I did in fact know from a ritual Seattle slaughter called the Cha Cha Lounge. Arwinne was there lusting for attention. She waited alone style at the scum profile bar. Eyes read a cross word. Drink rested on the coaster. Money sat on the counter. Pencil stuck in her hair. I was drinking whiskey at the Cha. DJ Crisco Sanchez was spinning heat in the back room. A flood of fashion flops flipped out the jam packed jam. I peered way back to see this kiddo Neighbor Wes recently gave me the low down on. That Arwinne magnetized towards him. Dude dared me to chew his vocal chords, this chump with a trucker hat to the side. Guarantee you that crusty smile on his fart face was only an allergic reaction to low grade meth. Creepy kiddo chatted up that Arwinne at the Cha Cha though, like I don’t know what. That Arwinne leaves the drool’s stink scene and meets me under the black light in that back hallway, an encounter which causes my ailing liver to involuntarily detonate.

"Hi,” she says to me.

“Oh hey,” I spit very disorderly, thinking only of murder.

“How’s it happening?”

“Oh cool, cool.”

“I like your get up.”

“My mom picked out these duds.” That got a chuckle.

“See ya around.”

“Not if I see you first,” I smiled back real hard.

“Stand By Me!” she says.

“Um.”

“That’s what River Phoenix says right before he is stabbed in the throat, remember?”

“How could I forget.”

That steamy pile of bile sunk me to the bottom of a semi-conscious pool void of any laughs where The Jesus And Mary Chain played and Himmerick Q’s me with “how are we this evening sunshine?”

“The sky is full of water you dummy.”

“Perspective Auggie. Without rain the crops won’t grow.”

By Himmy’s way of thinking, the distorted hallucination of Arwinne and that repulsive poser could only nourish this tale. These are the war games that make the battle worth fighting.

“You look a little scattered,” he told me. “Is there anything that you would like to tell me?”

“Same story different actor,” I said.

“Give me her name.”

“Aw wah,” I gargled.

“I’m sorry Auggie. I don’t speak stupid.”

“Her name doesn’t matter, none of them do. I thought she wasn’t who she turned out to be.”

“And that means?”

“That she’s content with strictly being a silly receptacle for that diarrhea breath Rhodes.”

“Chizzle Rhodes? The sleezebag from Beast Fister?”

“Oh fuck,” I said.

“You know that anus?”

“Why yes. He is a patient in studio cell 102 of the Bellevue Mental Hospital.”

“No goddamn shit.”

“None.” “I can’t be near that dick Himmerick. I’ll rape his skull with a teaspoon.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Murdering the scene’s most gruesome fiend?”

“Whatever makes you happy,” Himmerick said. He was smiling like a used car salesman real slanted and awful. He reeked of Salisbury steak.

“I had a real thing for her.”

“Story of your life.”

“Yeah well, in my stories I can write a new life forever.”

“Yes, but you must remember than anyone can burn your books and kill you off for good.”

“Go wrap your lips around a broken bottle of Scotch, buzzkill!”

Himmerick sat there and doodled on his pad. “Tell me Auggie. Why is this girl, this project, this main attraction, different from the others?”

“She isn’t.”

“Isn’t she?”

“All girls become my reoccurring nightmare.”

“So why do you try so hard to sleep?”

“Because you wanker, without the horrorshows my body does not feel. The pain is a fix and I’ve been broken…” “For years, I remember. Please, continue to bore us all.”

“No. I really wish you would stay out of my affairs, you cunt, especially if you don’t plan on helping me!”

“Did Auggie Joust just ask for help?”

“Eat dynamite you phony.”

“Because I do have vital information that will help your so-called novella elevate to the next level of absurd reality,” Himmerick said to a room of no one else but us.

“Fuck this scene,” I screamed.

“You’d like that wouldn’t you? To pound the entire Capitol Hill cool scene of Seattle America?”

“Stop calling it that.”

“Stop starting over again.”

We stood at a standstill.

“I’m evacuating this joint.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Fuck this place. Fuck those kids. Fuck Arwinne.”

“Arwinne?”

“No one, forget it. Forget to remember me always,” I told Himmerick, before I pretended to vomit all over him with a noise like harfle-parfle-derl-lerl-bergle-flergle-dergle-doo. Himmerick failed to release the slightest smirk. He firmly handed me a file. As I quickly released the thought of where my file was and who Himmerick had given it to, like a first-class shyster, Dr. Vic Himmerick smiles slick and sells me this line. “I now present the fat stack of past antics from the likes of one Chizzle Rhodes.”

CHARLABELL TINT | 7