I’m Depressed, So Buy Me Some Smack

by Christopher James Hassett
illustration by Jef Taylor

At the Textured Honky, I met her. Talking with Sealed. Sealed Ellen Advisory, a long time friend of us both, had no idea a chance meeting at a retro-techno micro-brewed dance club could lead to so much. Her name was Katlain Convertible.

She said her mother named her Katlain as opposed to Caitlin because she though it would help her modeling career. Katlain had been born and bred to be a model. House music was played when she took her first steps, and her mother made sure she never ate. Throughout her childhood, she was given cameras of all kinds, and her father would take snapshots of her at the most unexpected times, all to make sure she felt natural having her image immortalized on film. Katlain couldn’t dance. She had tried in the past, but every attempt ended with her walking a straight line for twenty feet, shifting her hips while showing off her dress, then walking back.

“I’ll be right back, why don’t you two get acquainted,” Sealed Ellen said. She must have seen my lips mouthing out the words of the last paragraph. Sealed knows I only narrate things in my head when I feel very strong emotions about them. Ms. Advisory trotted off to flirt with the bartender, leaving Katlain and myself staring at each other, wearing polite smiles to shield our egos.

I thrive in uncomfortable silence. It gives me the opportunity to experiment with my psionic abilities – my seventh and eighth senses that I’ve been aware of since puberty. They take the physical form of a potential mate and translate it into electrical pulses. These pulses are shot through my brain, providing me with the correct emotional status and proper amount of adrenaline needed to determine whether I should continue in my attempts toward developing a romantic relationship or withdraw. This method of mine has only a 93% margin of error. I began by studying every inch of her body.

Katlain Convertible had the smallest button nose I’d ever seen. I’m sure that if the situation got ugly, my nose could take hers in a fight. (Hell, my nose could take her whole goddamn family.) Her straight auburn hair cascaded over her shoulders, the perfect kind of hair for modeling shampoo. Her cerulean eyes captured me. They were a dark mystical blue. A healing blue. Smurf blue. Nancy Kerrigan without the overbite. As my intense glare panned closer towards her neckline, I expected her to mistake my psychic gift for something a bit more perverse, and take measures to prevent me from getting my unsolicited eye full.

Instead the most unusual thing happened:

She spoke to me!

She shared with me her life, her dreams, her hopes, and I did the same. Shouting through the flickering dance lights, I knew this was the one. With each faintly whispered word tapping through the digital wall of looping drum machine tracks of a drunken DJ, a world was opened to me. I saw someone who would enjoy my company without remorse. Two halves of a united spirit. Mutual interests constantly shared as each waking hour becomes less nauseating. We could get naked and watch David Lynch movies. Hand in hand, wearing heavily-dyed black overalls, we will stride over a zebra-striped speedo bridge constructed from the severed thighs of Transvestal Virgins of the Glam Rock Plague. Balancing ourselves on a dimensional tightrope to avoid falling into Alternapop Limbo and Classic Rock Hell, we nest in a pile of independent labels and friends’ demos, worshipping in our private universe with distortion pedal intensity, and discarding what bits of our love have been spoiled by overexposure to the drooling masses that made U2 famous.

Because this is a true story. About seven annoying people. Picked to air their dirty laundry on nationwide television. Find out who is the big embarrassment to their family, who gets kicked out, and who wins the Puckered Starfish Award for being the most unlikable yammering idiot that America has ever been cursed with.

With a sincerity I’d never seen in another human being, Katlain told me that “Poets are the Lounge Lizards of History, scribbling down as many pick-up lines as possible in one lifetime.” I was about to tell her the same thing. Then I said to her: “The only true artist is a bullshit artist.” And she said that was on the very tip of her tongue. In chorus we said: “Bruce Springsteen is what yuppies listen to when they want to feel working class.” We laughed. Our bond had become so close so quickly, I could tell Katlain was willing to share with me what she had been hiding from my supernatural intuition. For me, and only me, she complained.

I hung on every disapproving word Katlain had for people, life’s expectations, and the beer she’d been milking. Before I had a chance to offer her a new one, Sealed Ellen returned, skipping in a whimsical manner. Sealed told us that there’d been a shooting outside and invited the two of us to look at the body.

“C’mon,” Katlain grabbed my hand as she ran for the exit.

One body had tangled itself on the sidewalk across from the club, the victim of a shooting spree that lasted thirty minutes, ending with a police car chasing the suspect away. The officers were still in pursuit. This is the best part of a murder, the quiet awe of witnesses still in denial, waiting for someone in uniform to tell them a life has officially been taken. The passersby squawking the same words over and over. “What happened? What happened?” Sounding off the same way a five-year-old calls to its mother. The rest of us gawked.

The bleeding heap of inedible meat affected me in an unexpected way. Without realizing it, I started to pontificate like a baby boomer on public television. Someone was dead and that’s a bad thing. But if it’s so bad, why were we all out there to look at it? When someone is killed who is the real victim? Is it only the person who dies? What about the one driven to murder? Was it all of us who made him kill? Are we all accomplices for being so interested? What’s wrong with people these days? Why are we so interested in death? The ambulance sirens snapped me out of my one man rectal probe. And thank God for it. If I’d kept up with that particular brand of intellectual masturbation, I’d have wound up blaming the gun that was used, then a popular rock band or TV show.

I looked at Katlain and could tell what she was thinking. In her head, she was ranting like a WWII vet in line at the grocery store. Thinking what should be done with the punk once he’s caught. If someone else won’t, then by golly she will. No one knows how to handle punks nowadays. I squeezed her hand to bring her back to me. She looked up at and smiled to tell me she was OK.

Sealed Ellen Advisory was chewing gum, mumbling about all the blood. There’s no way to talk her down from that kind of mindset. All we could do was let her enjoy herself. A police cruiser arrived with two of those “Nothing to see here, move along!” parrots. The audience broke off into little discussion groups rating this kill and comparing it to others they’d seen.

A familiar face leaned against the wall. A long lost friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in seven years. And he’d been dead for six of those! I was elated and cautious at the same time. I’d seen dead friends before, but none of them had been miles from their graves, standing at a slouched vigil like a male prostitute. I decided to go over to talk to him. Yes, he was dead, but what other chance was I going to have to ask him what he’d been up to? I broke away from Katlain and told her I’d be right back.
“Lucio?” I said.

He looked at me with a blank expression on his face. “Oh, hi.” I’d received a more enthusiastic greeting from people who’ve hated me. His eyes were seeing past me, I’d never seen him this distant. He’d changed.

I tried to bring out the old Lucio with some small talk. “Pretty gruesome shooting, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“Yeah, but I bet a scene like this is nothing new to you.”

“What do you mean?”

He was looking straight at me now, a bit of anger written on him. I must’ve touched on a sensitive subject. He probably wasn’t supposed to be there. Or maybe he was just ashamed about being dead, and didn’t want anyone to mention it.

“Nothing, I’m just saying you’ve been around, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I guess I have,” he said.

Christ, this was frustrating! It was like all the life had been drained out of him. Why wasn’t he telling me what he’d been doing with himself? He should at least have asked how everyone else was doing? What’s new? Have I gotten a job? Is anyone married or in jail? And what’s the logic behind all this hype for that four-piece soundtrack to a Lite Ice ad called Hootie and the Blowfish? Nevermind. I’ll ask all the questions. Starting with the one I’d always wondered about.

“So Lucio,” I segued, leaning in so no one else could hear, “What’s it like to die?”

He hung his head, shaking it in disgust. I felt a knot in my stomach, I couldn’t believe I’d sunk so low. My friend shows up after seven long years, and the first thing I do is get all metaphysical on his ass. I knew he didn’t want to talk about it and I didn’t care!

“Hey, man, I’m sorry, that was a low blow.” Lucio said nothing, he just kept eyes to the ground. How was I supposed to snap him out of this? “I want you to meet somebody.” I turned around to look for Katlain Convertible. She’d disappeared. Then I noticed Lucio was gone, vanished without a trace. I was alone.

In my hand I felt a folded up piece of paper. I opened it up. It was written like a form letter, a million of these must be printed out daily. It started off:

“Regarding your question (What’s it like to die) it – ”

The words on the paper began to fade away faster than I could read them. Dissolving as if they were written with disappearing ink. I tried to speed read, but as I looked back to my lessons from school, the only things that kept popping into my head were visions of all my teachers from fifth grade on bitching about Proposition Two and a Half. The paper’s original content was fading. It was a flyer from a band called “Villi Manilli,” featuring “Clem the Ogre” on vocals. Clem is a legend in hardcore music: seven feet tall, six hundred pounds, tattoos from head to toe, and a massive underbite with two thirteen-inch-long lower incisors sticking out from his jaw. He’s easily picked out in a crowd as “the guy that looks like one of the goblins from The Hobbit cartoon.” I’d been looking forward to seeing them play. Clem has been known to jump off stage into the pit and eat people to get the crowd roaring. Not beat, EAT. But even with the weekend planned, I still couldn’t shake the image of that form letter Lucio had given me. I had the answer right in my hand. What’s it like to die? On the page I was given, there was one word I was able to read. I don’t know how important it is, but that word has kept me up for hours at night:

GREY

Waving to me from across the street, I saw Katlain, and I couldn’t help but smile. No matter what happens between us, I know that you can get more news out of Soldier of Fortune than you can out of Time Magazine, and that doesn’t scare me anymore.