Dandy Darkly

Grave Cliche

Mrs. Bond looked down at little fourth grade me, all dark eyes, pale skin and serious demeanor and cautiously asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

My reply, "Dead."

The class had done water color and crayon drawings of our future ambitions, all of them worthy of inclusion on any family refrigerator. There were brave astronauts, United States presidents, happy mommies... and mine. I'd drawn a house with smoke swirleys coming from the chimney. My dog, Possum, woofed in the front yard, and beneath the meticulously drawn blades of green grass was a little coffin. And there I slept. My arms folded across my chest.  

The principal called my mother, of course. It hadn't been the first time. Wouldn't be the last.

Having met the dead version of myself almost two weeks ago, I wonder if ten year old Dandy Darkly would find some bit of comfort knowing his revelatory artistry eventually comes to fruition. But then again, it doesn't take a psychic to know we all end up dead. It's the coming back from the grave that's the tricky part.

And about that...  

I am a bit concerned that I'm all icky and Voldemort-ified when I, presumably, have my First Death and come back. Really? Tattered robes? Skeletal frame? Black coffee with no milk? As an out and proud gay necromancer, I'd hope to be more of a fashion icon for aspiring young, gay exorcists... 

I've been processing what I saw that night on the floor of my former waitressing job. And also considering what to do with the Metrocard given to me by the alternate-me, the rotting self who finally responded when I conjured a witch's brew in search of an identity. The brew was a nasty one, really old recipe. ... I can't help but smile because... as vain as it sounds, the rotting me seemed pleased that I'd decided to use such a dark means to communicate with it. 

I remember rotting me squatting above waitressing me. It was bitchy. Very me. Everything was freezing cold. I do remember flashes of something else though, a blue business suit. I really want to believe it was me. A future me who eventually regains his power and comes all the way back in time to save me!

That's awfully sentimental, ain't it? There's really no room for sentiment around these parts. More than likely future me ends up pledging my eternal soul to some lower power, who in turn gives future me enough influence to put the dominoes in  motion to my ultimate demise... And let's consider those flashes of the the blue suit, and the cliche nature of the robes, the swarm of flies, the skeleton... this entity, whether it truly was me or an illusion, was deliciously malevolent, enticingly so...

Sure bells and whistles are sounding off, but when gauzy sentiment meets power hungry madness, the resulting combination is wonderfully distracting.

I haven't discussed any of this Ms. Margerie. She had been helping me down a less wicked path as of late, but now... I honestly can't live like this. Powerless. Useless. So fuck it. If this is the path back to even some sliver of the abilities I once had, I'll be skipping down that aisle wearing toddler skin slippers. I mean it! Line the toddlers up!

... Alas, who am I kidding? Of course I have reservations. I'm not the soulless demon in booth twelve. Yet. I can't help but think some (all?) of my past misdeeds are the reason this shitstorm was brought down on my goat's blood drinking ass. But I can't start playing mind games. Thinking about past lives or future selves. I have "Lost" for that. All I can focus on is the present. And presently I have this worn out, expired Metrocard given to me by an undead future version of myself.

I need to do research before I swipe this thing at a train station. I've written before how such places are powerful areas of spiritual influence. I also need to read up on accounts of meeting oneself, dead or otherwise. 

At least research is painless.

Curiosity Killed the Kitty Cat Clock

Try this at home, kids.

Take a jagged shard of glass, let it touch down on the surface of that milky white, twitchy moon that is your eyeball. Then dig out that fucker like it's a carton of vanilla ice cream and there's a line of screaming brats holding plates of birthday cake that need a la mode-ing. Then if THAT doesn't make you pass out, begin hammering a half dozen steel carpentry nails as hard and as deep as possible into the bloody remains of your former baby blues or greens or browns or hazels. THEN take a welder's torch and set the whole thing ablaze so the heads of the nails fuse into one molten, metal candle, and the imbedded ends of the things grow hot enough to singe the surrounding tissue, and you'll ALMOST have the headache I have endured for the past week.

It's all my own fault.

I tried to discern the identity of that mystery spirit sitting in booth twelve. And the backlash busted every blood vessel in my head, knocked my legs out from beneath me, caused a discernible panic among all the patrons (they fled into the night) and I chipped a fucking tooth! Oh and I lost another job. Patrick the perpetually sweaty fired me for being a clutz. That was after he ventured back into the ransacked diner, dishes broken, glasses smashed, frost covering the floor in patches. I'm lucky my walking papers didn't come with a court summons.

So Saturday night, there I was toiling at Hipster Burger. I was totally slammed, but still booth twelve was vacant the entire night, except for that familiar spectral presence. I won't deny I'm a competitive asshole at times. But now, here we were packed and still the hostess refused to sit booth twelve with customers. Alas the subtle influences of the paranormal world kept my booth empty, night after night. Sure I had other customers, but when you're so focused on the evil in an empty booth, how can you possibly be on top of refills and ordering some drunk asshole's burger medium rare. Goes without saying my tips weren't that great. Who the hell comes to a greasy spoon for exquisite service anyways? 

The Devil, that's who. (Or so I thought...) So there I was. On the wall, the smiley cat clock's little paws were inching towards midnight, the witching hour. Patrick continued to remind me to refill the sugar in booth twelve, food getting cold, to restock clean dishes, blah, blah, blah... but all my senses were aimed at the shadow form with his long skeletal fingers stirring that black cup of coffee...

I don't know when I decided to risk it. I'd brought some things with me, but who doesn't carry bits of human bone in their pockets? Enough was enough. This entity, his passive aggressiveness, had pissed me off. The kitty cat clock struck twelve. It was go time! I poured myself a cup of hot water. I nicked my finger so a droplet of blood formed. I pulled a few items from my back pocket; dried bone, a small brown and white feather. Facing booth twelve, I spoke beneath my breath:

Old crone's stew

Poison foul

Rancid marrow

And feathered owl

Crooked finger

Child born of sin

Pull back your hood

Fiend or friend!

With the final syllable, I downed a shot's worth of the bone, blood, feather tea and my physical world tripped out HARD! Patrick's sweaty face spun completely upside down. He was rattling off food orders backwards from his forehead. And then, like a raindrop rippling a swamp, his face simply collapsed in on itself leaving a featureless orb in it's place, like he had a beige egg on his shoulders. Everyone in the diner had featureless heads, yet they all watched me. Then the pain hit. I crumpled. The eggheads all reacted as one group mind and bolted for the door, screaming.

I'd fucked up the spell. Something had gone wrong. Why were they reacting this way? (Logic would suggest because I'm a freak, but again what use does logic hold in my world?) I was vomiting blood at this point, not all of it mine, most of it a distasteful after-effect of stirring up such a nasty, old-world witch's potion.

And then I felt the chill. What had spooked the cattle wasn't my distress: I'd finally gotten the attention of the ghost in booth twelve. It was no longer sitting idle. Now it was standing above me, the dirt crusted linoleum began to freeze as the entity regarded me at it's feet.

The kitty clock mewled like a feral cat, spinning on the wall before launching itself across the room. All the tables jumped and shook. Germ covered silverware rattled likes tambourines. Dishes and glassware cracked and shattered.

I looked up, barely able to open my eyes from the blinding pain. The thing's image shifted between dirty black robes and a midnight blue suit. I felt it crouching towards me. I wanted to cry. I wanted to drag myself behind the service bar. This was the end. The final, fucking bitter end! "Do it!" I thought. "Let's get this shit over with." The thing's breath was close to my face. A putrid combination of rotting meat and stale coffee.

"Finally, you asshole," it bitchily hissed in my ear. "Do you know how long I've been waiting for you to grow the balls to do something? ANYTHING?! God, you're pathetic." I gazed into it's sunken, gaunt face. I felt the brew's charms working. I gasped. Like, seriously gasped!

"Yeah, yeah... Listen take this," the creature pulled forth a worn Metrocard. It pushed the bit of plastic into my hand. "Don't lose it. You'll need it again... someday."

And then the spirit vanished into a cloud of buzzing flies. And immediately the police and fire department stormed into the diner. Right on their heels was my manager, his piggish features sadly returned. He seemed unphased by the enchantment and sfter a weak "I think we're going to have to let you go" speech, Patrick ordered they carry me out on a stretcher. I refused and proudly limped out of the diner to find myself a cab.

Remember when Pandora opened that box and all the evils of the world came flying out? But for all the pain and suffering she'd unleashed, there was still a tiny glimmer of hope at the bottom? For all my vomiting blood and painful headaches and loss of power, I have seen my own glimmer of hope in the darkness. But my personal salvation hides in a despair darker than the bleakest of mankind's trivial worries. And the being in booth twelve has given me the means to begin my journey into the abyss.

The entity in booth twelve, it was me.

Half Empty

Humanity craves the Extreme sandwich.

They put french fries on a sandwich, along with mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers. A swaggering jock-bro named Tommy seeks immortality with the invention of his very own Extreme sandwich. But Tommy will only get his name on the menu if our over-achiever-over-eater consumes five Extreme sandwiches in under forty five minutes. Tommy fails and vomits in a trash can. Folk legends aren't what used to be.

And up next on "Extreme Pig Outs" is the Heart Attack Cafe where waitresses (too-dog-faced-to-strip) wear nurse's uniforms and serve calorie soaked lunches to grossly obese, chauvinist pigs. A sweaty, chinned beast that resembles Tommy-at-fifty propositions a nurse-waitress for "mouth-to-mouth" after sucking on a lard slathered "quadruple by-pass" burger. The burgers are named after cardiac procedures and the establishment's owner is named, simply, Dr. Jon. 

Dr. Jon is not a doctor, by the way. Yeah, your world is rocked. Mine was too.

"Dr. Jon" informs the viewer that there's a grand reward for the littlest of sins: gluttony. Eat the whole thing and your choice of nurse will roll you out to your car in a wheelchair, and if you weigh over 350 pounds then you eat FREE, for LIFE! 

FUCK YOU HUMANITY! 

Fuck you. I'm HAPPY I'm powerless to save you. I've spent months freezing and starving in third world ghettos pursued by the nastiest creatures unimaginable, all for this? So fat Tommy can eat for life at the Heart Attack Cafe? Yep, I'm feeling bitter. Yep, I'm feeling useless. And for the first time in my life, I'm watching daytime television. And it's not a good thing! 

My new nighttime occupation serving less-than-Extreme sandwiches continues this miserable eve. Where once I vanquished nightmares and creatures of darkness, now I'm the vanquisher of midnight munchies at a Williamsburg greasy spoon. Once in Hungary a ghoulish horde cried for my brains. Now a hungry horde of guylined hipsters cry for organic, "violence free" fare. My secret words of power, once so familiar and now powerless, have been replaced with "do you want fries with that... sir?". 

And every single night, a shadow sits in booth twelve. 

And it recognizes me for what I once was, and what I am now: a failure. It pours sugar into a phantom cup of jet black coffee. And Patrick, my persistent manager, constantly reprimands me because booth twelve's sugar is half empty, but he doesn't understand what is sitting there! HE DOESN'T SEE IT! NONE of the sickening cattle who squat in those filthy booths and stuff their smacking mouths SEE it. You're all meat and bone and chicken fingers and nacho cheese ... and there was SO MUCH MORE to my life before all the death was taken away from me, and by the very fuckers who claim to protect you, the Church! That's the hilarity of all this. 

Maybe it's Death himself sitting in booth twelve? Is the master of The Void stirring his black coffee with a crooked, boney finger; his eyeless sockets fixated on my repetitive actions. 

Fill the sugar... 

Place the sugar... 

Fill the sugar... 

Place the sugar... 

Fill the sugar... 

Suddenly I'm one of the trapped repetitive specters I so pity. No...

I think I'm more like fat Tommy (aka fat Humanity) than I realized. My skills were renowned. I was on that menu board. I practically wrote the menu! Five extreme sandwiches? Fuck that. Give me eight, ten, a dozen! Destroy me and I will still be stronger than anything you can shove down my throat! (Vaguely sexual, yeah?) But it wasn't that midnight world who made me choke. It was Man himself.

In all my pride (another of our littlest sins) I failed to see my own arrogance had corrupted my journey. And here I am. What will happen if I don't fill that sugar? If Death runs out... will it be Patrick (humanity) who snaps first - or The Void in booth twelve?

It might hurt... but let's find out.

Dandy Declawed

I'm powerless. And they know it.

It began shortly after last year's visit by the Pope. Whatever dragged me into my bedroom wall and spit me out on the other side, it stripped me of my Mojo. 

Fuck. It sucks. I've tracked down very little information regarding the ritual, The Purification. It's also known as a "tarpit baptism." It's pretty much a high fiber colon cleanse of the arcane kind. I guess I should consider myself lucky. Everything I've read says the loss is instantaneous and results in madness. I've been capable of exorcism, but with less and less success, and am I mad? Honestly not sure. So don't know if this speaks to their skill or my primary attempts to banish the mark, but life has been hell for the past six months. 

It happens like this. You know that sensation you get when you're with a special someone (or in my case utterly alone) and things are getting sweaty and heavy, and you're about to... you know? Well, when I got a spook in my sights, and those words are rolling out and I can feel this vibe from the ground running into my legs, reaching up and grabbing my hands, running up my backbone, into my brain, and that euphoric sensation when you're about to... you know? 

BLAM! 

It's like a sniper puts a bullet through my brain. Nowadays the pain put's me on the ground. It started off just as numb headaches. Now the pain lasts about three days; needles behind my eyes. It's awful.

And as I said, the deadly ones know this dandy has been declawed. I feel them following me. Hear them while I sleep. And the shame of it all. Faces push forward from walls, sidewalks, tree bark and mock me, leering and laughing. Whispering and hissing.  

But the passive ones. The ones I used to talk to, bid goodbye to softly and serenely. They're too weak to even see me, to realize I'm there to help them. I'm invisible to them. They'll stand there for an eternity before stepping in front of that moving truck, or flying a kite on an overcast day, over and over and over. And I can't set them free.

Its gone. All of it. So... welcome back.

Life sucks.