Carlton Mellick III - Satan Burger

But Liz finds the act of allowing a blubber-filled shirtless skinhead rub his hand all over the insides of her clothes a more enjoyable performance. She forgets to reply to Nan’s question among all the fat-sweaty sensuality. Instead, she asks another question: “When do you want me to return that Hertzan Chimera book? I haven’t finished it, but I don’t think I’ll be able to.”

“What about Gin?” Nan asks.

“What?”

“Gin. Have you seen him?”

“I think he went on a beer run with Lenny and the guy from the first band.”

“Thanks.” Nan gets up, kicking Zit Beard on the way, and scuffling into a round-a-go crowd.

I appear on stage — swirl-swirl goes the crowd and the color-blooming makes my eyes sizzle — with my cello and my T-shirt that reads Battlestar Galactica 4 Life . I play a short slimy cello solo and then the song curdles into a blur of discord before it ends.

The crowd does not seem to notice we are here.

Vodka leaps from the toilet, stampers onto the stage, into our faces. “I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO MY BAGPIPE SOLO AFTER THE CELLO INTRO,” he screams, though his scream is non-exclamatory because of his anti-emotional attitude. He shoves Christian, thrashes the sheet metal, and rammer-runs through the warehouse, but his movements still seem robot-like.

The crowd doesn’t seem to notice Vodka’s outrage.

“This is our last song,” Christian says to the crowd. “It’s called The Greatest American Hero Theme Song .”

We play some gak-shrilling noises and squeal, but it sounds nothing like the original theme song. Before the music ends, we are kicked off of our own stage by a band of five skinheads. The singer (Zit Beard) takes the mic from Christian, pushing him into the crowd who beat him up cruel. Zit Beard spits on the crowd and everyone cheers.

In other words: ZIT BEARD = PUNK.

“We’re the Oi!s,” says Zit Beard. “Our first song is about smashing capitalism and breaking fascism and stomping religion and destroying all the governments of the world. It’s called PUNK ROCK!”

This is what he sings:

“PUNK ROCK! PUNK ROCK! OI! OI! OI!”

The punk kids are into songs like this. They cheer and jump and punch each other until the song ends half a minute later.

“Thanks,” he says. “Our next song is called ANARCHY!”

Nan gets herself outside to find Gin, but there is no Gin. She meets someone named Lenny instead, scurries over to him, stepping over a flattened little Abraham Lincoln hat.

She calls, “Lenny!”

He mopes around, all drunk and finished, was puking in the back lot, wiping some yellow off his chin. Lenny is a thin little guy, antsy stickman, so it didn’t take much beer to make him vomity drunk. He wears old lady glasses and a shirt that says, Kiss me, I’m Yugoslavian .

“Where’s Gin?” she asks him. “Liz said he went with you.”

“Oh yeah,” his voice cracks in a drunken sort of way, “Gin told me to tell you he’ll be at Stag’s place. I would’ve gone with them, but they wanted to stop off at Satan Burger, and… I’m Vegan Hardcore you know.”

Her face crimps up all red, squeezing her fists. “That cunt is dead. I told him not to go anywhere without telling me.”

Lenny shakes his head at Nan for acting the tough guy and walks away. “Well, I should get going then.”

“Lenny,” she stops him with her awkward voice, “You have a truck, don’t you?”

He turns back around, “Look, Nan, it’s not that I don’t want to take you…”

She grabs him by the wrist and drag-pulls him toward his truck. “Come on. We still might be able to catch him at Satan Burger if we hurry.”

Nan has many-many problems besides her tough-guy-dominating-Gin routine. She’s also manic-depressive, she’s missing half of her right lung, she’s an insomniac, and she’s always having problems with her sexual identity (An abusive father and three older brothers raised her as a boy). This kind of upbringing could have turned her into a lesbian, but since she is disgusted enough just being a woman, there’s not even the slightest chance that she would get the desire to have sex with one.

Richard Stein said that the only thing children need to do to keep the guns away from their heads is to have pets of their very own. A dog or a cat or a gerbil or even a goldfish would suffice, keeping their fragile little minds on the pets instead of on the nasty juices that society likes to spit at them. Pets may be just small creatures to adults, but they’re gifts of good mental health to the kids. Some children are allergic to animals, though, and tend to avoid owning them; and not owning an animal as a child ruins the perfect cure for keeping the gun away from the head once adulthood arrives. This sometimes results in what people call a bad childhood , and what a bad childhood does is make a person bitter.

Bitter is what we call Nan.

The only pet Nan ever had was a small black duck. She named it Chico and one time her father decided it was food and ate it. He was drunk and thought it would be a funny way to show off to his hairy shirtless friends.

The worst of Nan’s problems had nothing to do with visualizing poor Chico digesting inside of her spiteful father’s beerbelly. Actually, the worst of her problems had nothing to do with her father at all.

You see, Nan loves Jesus Christ very-very much. She’s deeply in love with him. Obsessively in love with him. And I don’t mean in a good-mannered sense of the word love . I mean she’s sex-erotically in love with him. She talks about how she wants to strip him to his crown of thorns, whip him until he bleeds salty red and the blood dribbles down his body until her nipples get hard and her sauce starts bubbling. Then she envisions screwing him violent-sinful, while he is nailed to the cross, dying-dying. And she fantasizes about fucking him until he’s dead on the cross, and then fucking him until he resurrects.

It all started when she was eleven and going through puberty. All her friends were boys, of course, and would talk about a thing called masturbation . (Richard Stein, by the way, said that masturbation is God’s gift to ugly people who have trouble finding any other way of obtaining sexual gratification, like myself.) They told her it’s all about fantasizing intercourse with the opposite sex. But she always felt she was the opposite sex, so she couldn’t fantasize about boys without feeling gay , and she thought of girls as stupid and disgusting, so both sexes were ruled out. The only person she could think of that she loved was Jesus — let me remind you she didn’t know the difference between Jesus-love and sex-love back then — so the savior, Jesus Christ, became her first masturbation fantasy.

Nowadays Nan masturbates to paintings of him all the time.

Around Christmas, you can see a strange glimmer in her eyes, like the spirit of Christmas is generating all kinds of nerve-tinglings on her insides, forcing her squeeze-excited. Even the nativity scenes get her sweat glands drip-drip-dripping.

Gin says that sometimes she’ll let out a BIG Ho! Ho! Ho! when she climaxes on him. “I think I like that,” he says. Christmas is a happy time for Gin too.

The strangest part of Nan’s Jesus-sex fantasies is that she gets the most aroused by visualizing Jesus going to the bathroom. She likes to picture him on a toilet, or crouching down in the bushes, or peeing over a balcony onto a crowd of his followers. Sometimes she imagines dropping a log on Jesus while he is being crucified (Richard Stein says that when you drop a log of sexual excrement onto your partner it is called a Hot Carl or sometimes a Dirty Sanchez , if you were wondering) or even squatting over his face to pee in his mouth.