The Rabbit Hole

You know that feeling? Pressure. The kind that decides what goes where. The thing that sticks our feet to the ground and is categorized in sinus headaches. I love that feeling, and it shows in every facet of my life. For a living, as in, to sustain the lifestyle I’m accustomed to in a capitalistic sense, I crush cars. And what else could I do? A fascination has grown uncontrollable inside of me. Watching a vehicle crumple in half, and again into a 2’x3’ cube is a little slice of diet heaven. All the glory and its easy on the bones.

            Most of the time it wasn’t the car looking to get wasted, it was something inside. Something that simply needed to disappear. As you can imagine this is a wonderful tool to have in the type of ecosystem the area has grown into. Sometimes it was odd, legal objects; Dead soldiers old belongings, an ex-boyfriends wardrobe, cats. Most of the time it wasn’t. It’s nice to have a poop shoot when you’re running a dirty business. To have a little capsule that you could rocket off to the edge of space. Turning evidence of any secret into a super condensed and indistinguishable block of metal. Now that can be a priceless resource.

            I even have the mayor in on this gig. He’s a venerable man, runs a tight ship. I actually voted for the bastard and had good reason to. But when a service girl goes overboard choking on her own puke, the whole ship might go down. I keep the vessel floating for my cut of tax dollars. It is good to have friends that you can show your true self to. Ones that don’t judge you by what you’ve done, but by what you are able to do. Oh, the possibilities are endless. I play the role of that friend because it all goes down the same drain to me. I don’t care what’s in the cars, nor do I look. The mayor isn’t the only one either. I have a slew of regulars and a constant flow of “My guy said you could help me out.” They bring in all sorts of things. Cars getting too hot to stay on the street come to me. “Can’t drive it without gettin’ tagged,” and thus is worth more as scrap metal than the risk of getting pinched. Beautiful machines have wilted at my hand because their power was abused. They flew too close to the sun. Cars don’t sell to good in that condition. You can’t sell one that has the faint scent of someone’s insides, and no matter how hard you scour, you know that smell never really goes away. You’re caught with a bomb in your hand and I’d be glad to ease the tension. Murder weapons, dirty needles, paper trails, always a person, if not, parts of a person, they all crunch up nicely.  I have found my niche, and It is the life blood of my community. They should be grateful I don’t strip their assets and declare myself lord and savior of the sinful. To keep the peace, I made a chart.

            If there’s a body, parts of a body, the smell or stains of a body, that’s a flat rate of fifteen hundred. The circumstances of how that body perished is the second factor. Overdose? That sort of thing happens all the time. These people can’t resist a slow infectious death. No big deal, an extra $200 for me to turn the other cheek, close the other eye,  and one count of felony paraphernalia as hazard pay. Murder? That’s a little more complicated and brings two counts of felony paraphernalia.   I work an honest business. I like to be paid off for landing in deep shit with God. And I serve counts equal to what the courts would, if only a bit simpler.  There is felony paraphernalia, $900 fine, and misdemeanor paraphernalia, $300 dollar fine. And it’s pretty easy to figure out where I split the line. The counts serve me as hazard pay, which is compensation for any risk that I may be undergoing by disposing of some unmentionables. The mayor lets me slide but this is how I add to the scheme. People are like parasites, if you don’t charge hazard pay they’ll eat you from the inside right out of your belly button. It’s beautiful how they all rely on me to hold them in place like the center stone of an arc. The reason is because most of the time, I’m the only soul in the world that can save your skin. I call the shots. Nobody in their right mind is in a hurry to go or to get back to the Big House.

            The best part of my job is that it is my skill, my talent, my passion, my only dream.  I am not fueled simply to service the town by disposing of its sins; I get off on the crushing. And I never really did have an aversion to violence. It never happened to me so it was easier to forget that there was a corpse in the vehicle. It never occurred to me that some of the pops and snaps coming from the machinery may be bones. This mindset can be very lucrative.  Cash underneath my floorboards, cash tucked under my mattress, a safe the size of a closet, there was too much to keep up with. And what did I care? The sole purpose of my job is to get that rush, that exhilaration, when the crusher seizes the toasted car in its jaws. To see the insides burst and the last of the liquids spurt out. I’ve witnessed this effect on the bodies too, the jugular spraying madly. I can usually pass it off as rust. I find this all very fascinating.

            This fascination has consumed a greater part of my life.  Pressure, force, physics, they govern everybody’s world, but they dictate mine. I am caught in an ever intensifying urge to crush myself. To squeeze up as small as I can, and maybe disappear. I wore c-clamps on my elbows and knees, disregarding the inevitable onset of arthritis, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.  I fitted myself with one of those colonial style gurdles, the kind that hides your fat. I’d lace it up nice and snug and enjoy gasping for bits of oxygen, and my diaphragm ticking like a bomb. All of my hats were a size too small, I prefer to sleep under the bed, and in grade school I’d piss off the boys with the intent of being at the center of a dog pile. They called me a fag but I’m not so sure if the truth was more gratifying. Everywhere I looked, everything I did, do, will ever do, revolves around compressing my physical self. My shrink told me to get a large girlfriend, ride cowgirl. Because that’s what we do, right? We adapt.

            Fat sex is the best sex. It may seem like a stretch, but nobody really cares what their fucking, they just want to feel. And the best feeling is fat sex. It is like being bathed in clouds, being propped on fleshy pillows. Pillows everywhere, blurring the lines between when one starts and the other ends, in case you didn’t know. Pasta sauce, ketchup, salsa and chocolate are now considered ‘love stains’, at least in my book. Fat chicks know how to bite too, they’ve done their homework. They could eat anything, including me. I’m not saying these old heifers resulted to cannibalism in a fit of food rage, but damn I bled a lot.

            The first time anything ever bit me was a cruel and unusual event. You could say it started something in me, a love. You could say it started something in the world. It was a fox or a dingo or some other kind of god awful desert dog, I’m not sure. As a boy the old man put the idea in my head to just reach down the rabbit hole, pull dinner out by the skin of its ears. He didn’t think his dipshit kid would be shoulder deep in the first hole it’d fit down. When that thing bit me it clamped down hard and didn’t let go. The creature thrashed around, ripping my arm with its scissor-like teeth, small enough bits to swallow. I tore my arm back and still display a horrendous scar on my left forearm. That moment, that perfect moment in time. When pins and needles danced across my arm, dripping with blood and spit. Trailing off into a dull tingle in the evening desert air. It was if I could feel all my little cells rushing to the wound to repair it. The pain made me dream of the things I hold valuable, the things I covet. The endless possibilities in every moment ticking away. The coyote watched with shining eyes and globs of drool dangled from its fangs.

            Clutching my arm, I scrambled away. Dirt and sand matted my bloody clothes and ground itself into my wounds from my clumsiness. Only then did I feel the stinging pain of the bite, and ever since that moment I’ve chased the sensation of being crushed. That feeling when you skin clutches your bones, and the last bits of sweet air steam rolling out of my lungs. I love that shit, and needless to say I didn’t have to do much soul searching to choose my career.  Every time I hit the hydraulic lift I get a little rubbery, you know, down there. And the infernal whine of the lift lulls me into ecstasy when the vehicle pops, cracks and hisses spill out and all around my head. Sometimes, not always, that hiss is the sound of a vein clamped shut and spitting out as much blood as it possibly could through the pinched end, spraying like a garden hose with your thumb over the nozzle. “That’s just rust, these blocks have been here a while,” I’d say to the following customer. Fooling nobody, they would taunt, “Sure it is, buddy,” and pass me a wad of bills and the keys to a perfectly running car. Nobody cared what I was doing. Not the law, not the citizens, not even I. Nobody wanted to screw up our little ecosystem and cash out on the sweetest dumping gig. The perfect system of wiping an object from ever existing was my niche, and I was, as they say, a keystone species. In the 37 years that I’ve been crushing, I’ve never had the police tail the yard.

            But in those 37 years I encountered something much worse. The thing that made it only 37 years. You know how they say you always kill the think you love, well it works both ways. My hunger, my fetish, my absolute need to feel suppressed is the thing that ultimately confined me. This downfall took the shape of a woman. Those who are the downfall to all great men because they are our one weakness. They bare our lineage, carrying on our spirit and the essence of our lives. The very primal system that gives a man his value. A woman is something to fight for, something to die for. And so the best way to take down a gallant man is with the heart of a woman. Forgive me if that comes across sexist, but the truth is we need each other, it gives us purpose. Someone must have known this.

            For me this woman was fat ass Francis Pepperdine. Francis, that fat ass that stole my heart and pimped it out for 25 bucks a nut. Her thighs layered in folds like pouring fudge. There were times when I couldn’t count her chins, nor could I count the beautiful moments of breathless suffocation she brought me. Her hair was short, greasy, and sporadic. Like that of an animal given the juice but somehow still survived. She even had the same twitch of a fried animal. This wasn’t always the case, she wasn’t like that when we first met. But a lot of things changed over the course of our relationship.

            Our first meeting happened as if by magic. She came to me all wrapped up like a present in her crumpled off-white Ford Focus. It was terribly mangled with her fat puffing into the deepest corners of the automobile. Poor Francis was packed in there like spray foam insulation.

            Dougie Baker, a regular, was the saint that delivered her to me. He flew off his rocker one night, probably amped on whatever drug he was pushing. He cut through a red light and the next thing he knew he had a fat ass Francis Pepperdine all gift wrapped. Usually he’d opt for the hit and run, smash his dented and unverified car in my yard and lift another one. Dougie’s lips weren’t the tightest so I knew about all his dealings. This little problem of his was a bit more complicated. Francis would never be able to free herself and people tend to look into murder more than a trashed car.

            So now I’m faced with Francis imprisoned in a car, dragged to my yard, and Dougie trying to talk me down on the bill because she was still alive. The first, and most important rule of business that that partner does not mean friend. I did my best to hide my instant fascination with Francis so I could milk Dougie for everything he had in his pockets, which was always sweet. I claim to have morals, “I’m not a killer Dougie, I can’t crush the car with her in there and we can’t let her walk less she squeal to somebody.” The cheap hustler knows me too well, knows my intentions, I ask for three but settle for two. Even though he needs me, he knows I need her. I cannot stop my relentless slobbering, my gleaming eyes, my bulging crotch. I give him a license plate number, shake his hand and tell him I’m sure I’ll be seeing him soon, people don’t change. Even if they claim to, even if they change for years, we always revert back to our instincts.

            Being a professional is a strict practice which I try to fallow as closely as I can, but it’s hard to get professional tools. None of my clients are willing to lift a set of Jaws from the fire department. And so my jaws of life bare teeth of a chainsaw, a hammer, a hatchet, and some common sized wrenches. The sight of the tools spark a blaze of fear in Francis’s heart, as if her being held hostage hasn’t terrified her enough. She starts to glaze over with sweat as I grind away at the roof of the Focus. That look in her eye, a brew of fear, panic, despair, claustrophobia and probably hunger, it’s the look I fell in love with. I’m not sure how to manually rip apart a car, it’s not really my specialty but love drives us to do amazing things. All the while trying to keep an eye on Dougie who is looking for the right car to leave his deposit in the glove box of one of my impounded cars. Our relationship is so fragile I am confident every last cent will be in that lock box, Dougie wouldn’t dare loose the best disposal service in town. He’s too pretty for jail, and too slimy of a hustler.

            Cutting apart the car with my sub-par tools would be hard enough without the sounds of a beaten seal wailing up at me. Francis has a fat voice from the sound waves compressed by her thick-cut cheeks. I tried to calm her, though I am not the most soothing person. It had mild effect but the bleating calls of distress did not end until I set her free and her fat spilled out of the car like water in a ruptured swimming pool.

            Now we need to understand Francis Pepperdine a little better in order to understand her instant devotion to me, and the story of our love. Never in her life had she been sought after, she was unwanted. And so she was plagued with fits of selfishness, not wanting of anyone else. She wondered why this man would go through such great lengths to save her. At a very young age Francis learned that she lived in a world with no guarantees, and people would usually try to take what you had. She wasn’t going to ride a crashing stock market or hurl to the ground in a bunk airplane. The only thing that couldn’t be stripped away from her was her weight, it was a project. That and tattoos. Her life was a never ending race to grow and decorate the only vessel she had. Most of her tattoos were blurry and stretched. Her tramp stamp of daisies she got when she was 15 is now a lush field of unproportioned greenery. She grew fatter and fatter as she grew older, just to see how long the ride would last. Fuck it.

            But little did she know that that ride would land her here, in my yard, and in my heart. I scanned her closely to paint every detail of every fold into my mind. My mouth began to water, my teeth chattered on edge from arousal. Something burned inside of me carving out a pure lust. I’ve never been a smooth talker. Actually I’ve never been with a girl that didn’t hate herself, which didn’t bother me much. I’m the kind of person that takes advantage for the sake of having the advantage. It’s not hard to entice a plump virgin you’ve just saved. Francis was my fix, my ultimate dream. My hips still ache in the winter from her relentless pounding. I even lost a toe because of her. Her massive girth cut off the circulation to my lower half and my third toe on the left rotted away into what they call dead tissue. I didn’t miss it for a second. Beneath her I felt smaller than ever, compressed into a sweet little package. Above me she felt larger than ever, and felt a mountainous swelling in her heart. She said I made her feel alive. Not alive like inspired to change, to fix herself and to save a fucking tree. No, alive as in the life of Francis Pepperdine. She was more livacious, if only in her search for food. An unbearable compulsion to chew fell upon her. And in her days of fantasizing about shredding food apart she would drool great heaps like rivers coursing down a mountain. It didn’t bother me, I had always slobbered a lot too. We were meant to be together. It was all these syncronologies in our personalities that brought us close. How voracious and animalistic we both were while making love.

            Her chewing problem evolved into something more like gnawing. Gnawing at me with great pools of slobber filling my wounds. Gnawing at every bit of food that grew her into a fixed lump on her bed. So much so that she couldn’t get up if she wanted to. I became her nurse, sponging the rank scent of carbohydrates out of her skin and delivering an hourly feast. I didn’t mind. This gave me a chance to escape when I needed to, I was never trapped in her presence. By which I mean if she had planted herself at my place I would have no way of transferring the half ton monster that was my love. So she was a shut in and I had my escape. My escape back to the yard with all the relics of my past. Rust covered cubes stacked high as buildings in a fortress of wrangled metal and bodies melting into soup. It was a monument to my obsession, and the only way for me to rake in the insane amount of cheddar it took to feed Francis. Not to mention my pivotal role in the economy of the city.

            This became a time of great need. Gradually, steadily, my quotas rose to the point of constant crushing, endless lines and towering stacks of cubes. A waiting list. My regulars must have started a business of their own because they were bringing in more cars than they could defile, and I became an even greater kingpin. Connections are everything. I became a local economy in my own right. Never have I seen such an influx in mortality. It rivaled the great plagues of Europe. I started running tabs for Dougie and the Mayor until Dougie brought me a Silverado with the Mayor and two street scags tarped over in the bed. The infrastructure was crumbling. What was killing all these people? I began to be racked with the question of business morality but possessed by the demon of greed. Frankly, what did I care if my town was wasting away? It only meant more business for me with a product that would always be in demand. Always restoring itself. Greed. The virus that ravaged me, was the same epidemic that coursed through the veins of every citizen.

            Even fat ass Francis established a business in the market; one that drove the market in itself. No one would think she would go into this line of work, she wasn’t the type. But her product was special, just like my service. A much needed item in the hunger driven primitive order we live in. Her business drove my business. With my constant absence she grew lonely and began offering her sexual services. Not just sex, fat sex. And yet, not just fat sex, sex that was brimming with lyssavirus. A terrible virus spread through any type of bodily fluid. The name is derived from the Greek goddess Lyssa, the goddess of madness, rage, a frenzy. A genome of rhabdoviridae, mutated and sprang into life by yours truly. Before I came along the virus was contained to animals, they would grow violent, mutilating each other and ultimately dying of the disease. To put it simply, I gave the bitch rabies.

            In modern times the virus is easily stopped through immunization. So why wouldn’t folks be rushing to the hospitals at the word of an epidemic? It spread like wildfire through sweat, slobber, sex, and snot. The reason is because contacting rabies from fucking fat ass Francis Pepperdine was the best ride a man could buy. It came with a warm tingling that was ungodly evil. It felt so good tears would stream down your face and your anus would clinch so tight you couldn’t shit for a week. The town was enthralled, they came from every dark hidden corner of the city to catch the virus. They didn’t know what was happening to them, or what drove them to pay to have sex with a couch tumor. All they knew was that after getting a piece of Francis their lives would erupt into a frenzy of animalistic out lash. It felt good to forgo all concern for human life, to just stop caring about what was happening and ride the rocket into the sun. But when people release all inhibitions, it can be a very destructive thing. Go figure.

            Every action became instantaneous, hostile, violent. Nobody cared what it was you had to say, no logical defense could stop a rabid man from nipping your jugular and bathing in your blood. If you were to go people watching you would notice a pink tinge in everyone’s skin due to the messy nature of blood. Most of the violence involved people making use of their dentition. At this rate evolution would take hold and within the century human canines would grow equivalent to that of a large carnivore, teeth designed for the severing of spinal cords. And the world descended into chaos because this dipshit kid didn’t know the difference between a rabbit hole and a fox hole. In the end, It was that mistake that grew my empire of control, and the thing that brought it crashing to the ground.

            At first the police scurried to keep up with the surmounting incarcerations. But snipping and snarling inmates transferred the virus onto the force, and the boys in blue lost their inhibition to protect the city. Instead they wanted to crack down on unjust beatings. Strapping on the cuffs just didn’t scratch their itch. And who was there to stop them? Who remained healthy and clear headed enough to stop the senseless violence?

            Without the threat of incarceration, nobody bothered to dispose of their victims. I was of no use because there was no need to be inconspicuous. Bodies littered the streets, either murdered or so strung out they simply collapsed in a pool of their own saliva. I couldn’t even crush cars. Turns out that fascination is a symptom of the lyssavirus and people were ramming their vehicles into anything, each other, buildings, all to feel what scientists call ‘the pulse’. The center stone of an arc is merely a stone when the whole structure crumbles. I suppose when our loves grow excessive, we all spend a little time going down the rabbit hole.