No comment
The door out of Sweaty’s Place will not open, even though it has not been locked.
The pandemonium has been reduced to one man chasing 15 with a sword. He has already hacked some of them to pieces.
While some of Sweaty’s patrons remain hysterical, cowering in niches, blubbering and screaming, unable to contain their horror and fright, pissing and shitting their briefs, hands and faces covered in tears, snot and drool, most have grown accustomed to the slaughter taking place before their eyes, at once disbelieving, shocked, and strangely transfixed by the barroom bloodbath. They can only hope that The Highlander Slob does not mistake any of them for a member of the CHORUS. They begin to listen to his ravings – as it is only natural for people to try to make sense out of complete madness – in an attempt to catch a hint of his motivations.
Everyone is terrified of The Highlander Slob. He looms far too large and insane and fierce. And yet, they are fascinated by him. Indeed, his eyes burn with what can only be the fires of Hell – cosmic malevolence and rage; measureless and primordial evil.
“… gang ina riptoid o’ bloood,
Thrust ‘n’ stab ‘gain ‘n’ ‘gain
Aye, ‘til Oi be wadin’ i’ bloood
Litrally swimmin’ thro’ the wine-dark thick
O’ meddlin’ men’s liquid loif
‘n’ the timorous quakin’ o’ their puny
Petty, misrable, cantankerous ‘arts…”
No one will have been brave enough to stop him. There is no talk among the men, who have come to Sweaty’s for inebriation, never expecting that they might die, to join forces to disarm The Slob and perhaps kill him with his own sword. But they also think: ‘How will it end? Once he’s done, what happens next? Maybe we should do something after all. Surely, once he’s done with the 15, he won’t stop there. He’ll come after the rest of us.’
Like his customers, Sweaty Tank Top, contrary to his thoughts and the myths he has raised about himself in his own mind, is paralyzed by fear. He can no more stop The Highlander Slob than anyone else can. People, of course, look to him to do something, as he owns the place, unloading their fears, excuses for inaction, feelings of guilt and culpability onto him. For his part, seeing this, Sweaty raises his arms up wildly, and making incoherent gurgling, gasping and sundry lunatic noises, like a wounded bellowing beast, twirling around and around, places his hands on the sides of his head and rolls his eyes to the back thereof – as though the whole thing is driving him insane and therefore incapacitating him to act. Otherwise, he would have thrown his life into the fray, risking it to stop The Slob and save the innocent CHORUS from dying. This is the excuse he will use, he thinks, if this all ends somehow, and he gets out of it alive.
“Wha’re these loives ta moi?
A hand ‘ere, a foot thar,
A nose, a buttock, a genital, a foice.
Oi change no’ the sum
But onlie the ratio o’
The distribution o’ their parts.
Better men than they ‘ave doid
As Oi will doi – soon, na,
Whoil warse will live on.”
Andrew Plumb stands at his table with his arms crossed and calmly watches the carnage, while Lard’s Ego pulls desperately on Plumb’s suit jacket flap to sit back down. No, Plumb thinks, it was not enough to see Steve Kowalski, who had humiliated him in the realm of writing. Now this. What’s the use in acquiring magical powers, turning Kickshitz into a stuffed owl and growing in cleverness, deceit, and guile, strategically planning in great detail and executing (he thinks) the murder of Lard, and committing one or two other such crimes every now and again to keep his path clear in what he plans to be a long and fruitful career of gaining influence and power, when out of the blue, some big drunken greasy mop-headed slob wearing a skirt simply decides he’s going to spontaneously hack to death a sizeable portion of humanity? And then does it – seemingly with no doubts or hesitation. Rampage – bam, bam, slash, slash, slash – they’re dead and hacked to pieces, and he goes on and on. What’s the point, then, of cultivating evil as a friend if someone can just be evil at the instant, with no thought to it at all?
Only Josh Davies, who has recently sucked some of the Kyiv Poster’s Bret Boner’s life out of him, and is therefore eyeing the youthful-looking Sonny Boner with anger, malice, and suspicion, is mildly amused. Somehow seen by no one, he sits back – way back in a nigh-unreachable recess of Sweaty’s Place – sipping a mint julep and taking in the massacre.
The Highlander Slob is now after the All-Scots CHORUS Jew.
“Kill the Jew, kill the Jew!” voices from around the bar cry. The cries are at first desultory, uncertain, and scattered, cowed and terrified as everyone is by The Slob, but then they gain in strength and resolve, until just about the entire joint is chanting in unison like a hypnotized madhouse mob. They think that by siding with The Slob against a scapegoat they will gain his confidence and trust and avoid the same fate as the largely innocent CHORUS at The Slob’s murdering hands.
“His name’s Goldstein!”
“Yeah – kill him, kill him!”
“He kills sick people groaning under walls!”
“Sometimes he goes around poisoning wells!”
“He said so himself!”
Two characters wearing dark-gray suits and fedoras, who look like Jack Step and Dirk Dickerson, but aren’t, get up at a table and shout:
“No! Don’t take out Goldstein! Who’s going to get The Commix published and into the movies?!”
But, Commix or no Commix, The Highlander Slob mows down the Jew as he had done the seven Scotsmen before, and as he will the seven Scotsmen after – as he would have mowed him down were Goldstein a Jew or not.
“Eat me sword, aye,
An’ swaller yarself
As Oi plunge Death down
Yar eager ‘n’ hankerin’ gullet.
That’s roit, mate, smoil whan Oi
Tear yar ‘ead off yar blooody neck
An’ clap yar feet in yar doying spasms
‘Gainst the floor far the joy o’ bein’ brought
Boy moy ina yar new warld
War thar isna na mar suffrin’ ‘n’ poin
See the shoining loit i’ yar blooody ‘ead
As the loits ga-at i’ yar oys
An’ Oi sloice and smear yar fookin’ guts aroun’
Drownin’ the walls o’ this joint i’ yar blooody blood
An’ makin’ a general mess o’ this stage…”
“Dirk, what are you doing here,” I say, surprised to suddenly see Dickerson looking at me.
“I might ask you the same thing, Jack.”
“But I thought you were –”
“Yeah, you thought. Escaping from asylums has become kind of a hobby for me. You’ve done one, you’ve done them all. Say, listen, Jack. Why are you sitting up here writing some cockamamie report instead of doing something about what’s going on?”
“But I can’t, Dirk, because of…” And I point down from the press box far above the bar at Steve Kowalski, who, through the midst of the murder and the mayhem, begins to move calmly toward the stage.
“Poetry Boy?” Dirk says, shaking his head in disbelief.
It’s too late – for me, anyway. Dickerson’s in a rage. He takes me by the collar and smashes my head through the press box glass, which rains down its shards on the saloon below. He crashes my head against the wall and pounds it with his fists. I am down, doubled-over and near passing out on my knees. I feel the flutter of something cloak me in dark and when I come more to my senses, I see it is Dickerson’s suit jacket which he threw at my head before heading down.
Blood gushes from my nose onto my shirt and drops on the desk as I clamber over it to look out and down at the bar through the press box window that is no longer there. My lips and gums swell around my mouth so I won’t be able to talk for a while, and my left eye is beginning to close shut.
There’s Dickerson – down there – running toward The Highlander Slob.
Filed by Jack Step, reporting live for No Comment Zine, January 19, 2014