We had been drinking Four Roses for over three hours and I didn’t think I could take much more of his talking.
“You rent out the same exact car as you drive, and swap the parts!” he said, slapping his hand on the bar.
“You actually do that?” I asked. Not that I felt any way about it morally, I just couldn’t believe a Neanderthal like Junior had thought up such a good scam. Sounded like something he read on the internet.
The bar that afternoon was filled with people like Junior. Speckle-headed alcoholics with noses spun of veins. Men who considered this place their office. Even out-of-work writers like myself. They ate and got drunk and told all sorts of lies, as people generally do in places like this. And because they had not done much with their lives the lies were overflowing with glory and disaster.
I came out today because I’d been horribly sick for a week and Junior told me he had “the perfect cure.” If you could trust one thing about alcoholics, it was that they had all sorts of witch cures and pseudoscientific remedies for feeling bad. Junior told me he’d been working as a food inspector, and that during a recent run he’d stumbled upon “something fucking crazy, man.”
“So when can we go?” I asked swaying on my stool, green rising in my neck.
Junior got out his badge and showed it to me. It looked fake. “They usually only take official inspectors, so you’re lucky to get in at all. Just wait—I have someone else coming.”
Maybe this was just another one of his scams, but I could feel bacteria goring the glands in my jaw and behind my temples and I’d go anywhere for a remedy. I was all pus. I’d eat dog food if it promised to reverse whatever was blooming inside me.
After another drink, a prostitute came in and sat down next to us. She was wearing leggings with the Juicy Jay coconut pattern on them. She got out a fat chapstick and said it was used for her labia. Asked if anyone wanted to “top her up.”
Junior shrugged—this was who we were waiting for. I didn’t care one way about it. I only thought it was unusual to see a girl out walking the blade this day and age. Most everything was digital now. I figured she must have pissed someone off.
Junior immediately started in on some moronic bit. “Have you ever hear of Dr. Voronoff?” he asked her ordering her a drink. “His first monkey-testicle-to-man-testicle xenograft occurred in July of 1920. You see, he took a monkey ball and sewed it up in a man’s pouch. That’s how they fixed stuff back then. Imagine a John like that?”
The prostitute was not impressed with Junior ’s drunken ramblings. She just itched herself and hocked up some phlegm. She had the lazy eyes that didn’t much care for what anybody had to say at that point.
An hour later and we were all good and drunk and standing underneath a glowing yellow awning. BoBo’s Kitchen, it said. We went inside and Junior got out his badge and waved it at the lady behind the register. She eyed me and the prostitute for a bit, but then nodded and let us through. Her perm never moved.
We stumbled down a narrow corridor that led to the walk-in freezer. The Chinese lady opened the freezer’s door and put out her arm. “Please,” she said. “Have a good time. And remember our generosity when deciding our health score.”
The door closed and it was black and cold. I could hear Junior messing with something and then a new door opened at the back of the freezer. The smell of incense wafted in with the sounds of people.
“Trust me,” Junior said to us. “You’re gonna love it.”
We stepped out into a bazaar. Or something like one. Around the edges were stalls, and in the middle were tables for people to eat. It was all food inspectors in here. The food was unlike any I’d seen. Glow-worm garnishes. Lymph steaks. Hocks and tendon and guts of giant bugs all being mixed into soups. There were human heads. Slippery gullet meats. They had arms and legs piled high and grilled to perfection.
It felt like we were outside again with the noise and the light, but when I looked up, I could never quite find the sky. A tangle of stalls and wires and canopies stretched up forever.
“Come on!” Junior was now yelling to break through the chatter of the crowd. He took the prostitute’s hand and slapped me on the back. “I’ve got the perfect dish for you two. Cured me right up last week.”
The stall he led us to had words written in what looked like an interdimensional dialect on its sign. We ordered something called the Green Spine Jumbo—a rough translation. The prostitute itched herself and dug right in and I knew then she had crabs and that Junior gave them to her. That he had got her in trouble and this is how he promised to fix it.
I looked down at my plate and there were indeed little gelatinous green spines in some sort of brown sauce. They wobbled.
As soon as I took a bite, I felt a release. A pang of release which was better than all the highs I’d ever felt. My stomach untwisted. Relief!
I didn’t know what exactly was happening there, but it was something unregulated for sure. We had stepped into the realm of the unreal.
