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Sherry stormed into her apartment and the first thing she noticed was the light blinking on her answering machine. “Probably that son of a bitch begging for my forgiveness,” she yelled at the machine, “ not on your god-damn life, mother-fucker!” She pushed play. Pow! “No!” Like an egg slipping out of her grasp, Sherry’s self-protective shell shattered to the floor. She lay on her back crying; beating her fists into her burnt, pipe stained linoleum floor, shouting his name repeatedly. Sherry attended the funeral wearing a ghostly colored, spaghetti strapped summer dress, deathly opaque panty hose, and a pair of rebellious black, Harley Davidson combat boots. She sat in an isolated pew in the back of the Catholic Church, chewing on a bloody hangnail and instead of sucking the red; she inadvertently wiped it off on the front of her white dress, forgetting that she wasn’t wearing her usual black attire. “ Fuck me,” she whispered to herself. You see, Sherry was opiate lazy, and black clothing facilitated her sloth, plus it hid the unanticipated accidents she inevitably found herself in, like the crusty, leftover platelet stains and the dried, yellowish, cotton candy residue frequently left behind after a li’l “S’upm, S’upm, Session”. Wearing all black was a kind of unconscious, humanistic insurance, to accommodate her lack- her lack of choice. Sherry and Drew resided in a squalid, studio apartment, on 6th St. and San Pedro in L.A. (a shithole, within a shithole) where aspiring, breadcrumb eating, sniffing and trying to smoke, artists, photographers, writers, models and musicians all shacked up together, until they were “discovered”. More often than not though, they “discovered” other things along the way that dragged them into a different direction. Every day Sherry and Drew would walk up to 6th St. and Alvarado from their “crack-shack” on San Pedro St., she’d shake her Maraschino Sherry ass along the way, hump, bump, and they’d both score for the day, disappearing into the bathrooms at Macarthur Park to recharge their drug depleted batteries. Nuff said. They did what they had to do, to maintain their “higher way of living”, willingly submitting themselves to the rock bottom world of stone cold hearts, where people were often crushed into gritty cement backwash to support the next victim’s retaining wall. Sherry fiddled with her Olivera Street bartered, heart shaped pendant; Drew had given to her for her 25th birthday. She opened the locket staring at a picture of Drew, reflecting back to the last time she saw him alive. It was the Fourth of July weekend. Drew’s sister Mary went out of town for business and needed someone to stay in her Pacific Palisades luxury house to feed her cats. She felt sorry and a little guilty for taking the advice of some ‘Toughlove’ group, telling her to abandon her little brother. “At least he’d have a clean place to stay,” she thought, equating staying in a clean place, with the hopes that that might somehow get him clean. Big mistake. Then again, sometimes the squeaky clean family members are sicker than the addict is; hence, the crazy logic makes sense. Unlike Drew, his older sister Mary, was the quintessential, Miss Prissy Goody Two Shoes poster girl. She never drank, never smoked, never experimented with drugs, and hadn’t even busted her cherry yet. (Premarital sex is a sin, you know.) Mary made her parents proud, went to an Ivy League college, and became a lawyer. Eventually the sister saint and his family, ex- communicated him after they found out he was using drugs. “I only used them for recreational purposes,” he’d protest, “what’s the big fucking deal?” The big fucking deal was that he stole his parent’s credit card for a 3000-dollar cash advance to purchase his drugs. “But that’s another story,” he says, “I was going to pay them back.” Drew also had a younger sister, Melody, who shared things with him- possessions to die for, like, umm- smack. In some respects, Drew thought she was even more of a cunt than his older sister was, (she was a hypercrit) but if he had any hope of Melody sharing her dope with him when he ran out, he had to kiss her ass. “Hey, I scratch her back, she scratches mine,” he used to say, “it’s not about friendly blood pleasantries, it’s about warm blooded survival!” Melody, was a closet junkie who, to hide her own demons, pointed her dogmatic finger at Drew and Sherry, while shooting up costly cracker jacks behind Catholic closed doors. Melody fooled everybody by faithfully attending mass on a daily basis. She didn’t believe in any of that moral crap, but found that it was the best place to hide out if one had acquired a fondness for the muddy, manufactured magic. The house of worship served as an ideal haven to secretly slip into an outfit and then nod out afterwards. Only once did a few bless-ed old bats bother her, catching Melody with her head slumped over her chest, while drooling on herself during a Sunday service. She simply told the Holy Roller grannies that she was in a deep meditation with God, and to leave her in silence lest she miss the Lord’s message. That shut them up real quick like, and probably made them feel a little guilty afterwards. Despite her drug habit, Melody was still able to support herself (legitimately) (well, sort of) by working as a hostess at a posh Beverly Hills restaurant, in addition to giving expensive blowjobs to wealthy businessmen in-between breaks. Melody was a master at manipulative dope fiend maneuvers, especially since she didn’t look like your stereotypical Hollywood Boulevard, raven- haired, gothic junky, but rather like a sweet and innocent Catholic schoolgirl, but looks can be deceiving and things aren’t always what they seem. This pissed Sherry off. Besides hating Melody for being so hypocritical, she hated her for being able to get away with her drug habit, while Sherry could not. Inside his sister’s estate, Drew was going off on another one of his two-hour tangents about the meaning of life, (brought on by Meth of course). Sherry tried to stop him by kissing his rage-filled lips, but he pulled away from her, and when she looked into his eyes, they appeared to be two floating black boats, slowly drifting away from her in the middle of the Styx. Drew stood up in front of the mirror pointing his finger at Sherry’s reflection. “People don’t want to see the mirror image of their shadow self, choosing instead to seek illusionary comfort in what they perceive as light! Drew points to the sun slowly diminishing down the Santa Monica coast. “What people have been taught was light! You can’t get to the light, until you’ve been through the dark first! I represent truth and that terrifies people!” He picks up a clay ashtray Mary had made for him years ago at day camp, and hurls it through the front window. “Take that, you bitch!” Sherry put her hand over her mouth; she didn’t know what to say. She was frustrated that she couldn’t remove the monstrous beast out of his head. Sherry unlaced the strings on her combat boots and threw them out the window along with the resented ashtray. “Give me a bump,” Sherry said. Drew placed a pink butterfly tab between his ruby lips, clasped Sherry’s head between his hands, and inserted the blissful rejuvenation into her mouth. He slithered his tongue awhile with hers, gracing the soft ridge along her gum line and finished the kiss off with a piercing bite to her lip. Soon they became one with the black leather bean bag they were sitting in, sinking into its quicksand mold, while watching “Wild On,” featured on the Discovery Channel. About a half an hour later, Sherry transformed into one of the wolves on the Discovery Channel. She ran on all fours out to the back yard to dig a hole. In an attempt to subdue his restless bitch, Drew followed her from the rear, nipping at the backs of her ankles. Instinctively, she lifted her hindquarters to his snarling muzzle for him to lick, after which he savagely mounted her from behind, thrashing his primal maleness in and out of her feral hole. The wild dogs howled to the moon, uniting with their basil nature, later snuggling up naked inside their wolves’ den, she’d dug outside earlier, and falling asleep. The following morning- “Get your skanky ass up, and get the hell out of here! I never want to see you again!” “What?” He slaps her across the face. “Go!” “Fine, I’m sick of this shit, you loser!” Sherry runs into the house to get dressed but before she leaves, she goes out to the backyard where Drew still lay in their wolverine’s den; she picks up the hose and sprays him down. She bolts down the street, Drew furiously chasing after her in his nakedness. He doesn’t get far though, after realizing his “societal decided” human vulnerability. Sherry yawned and rolled her eyes as she listened to the last pathetic mourner, Drew’s older sister, Melody, give her tearful eulogy. Sherry was amazed at how well his sister cleaned up when she had to save face in front of other people. Sherry couldn’t control herself, she stood up from the pew and yelled, “Hyper-needle hypercrit!” Every head in the church turned around to look at her. She smiled and stuck her tongue out at them. She points her middle finger in Melody’s direction. “God frowns upon lukewarm believers!” Sherry marched up the church isle, looked down at the bloody stain in front of her dress, threw her head back, and started to laugh like the demon thing from the Exorcist. Drew would have really dug this, she thought. Next, she raised her holy communion-colored dress, reached into her underwear, and with a Strawberry’s squeeze and a Wench’s tug, she plucked a “China White Delight” filled condom from her crotch. “ Fuck you, fuck you,” she snarled, placing the goods inside of his death box, resolving to herself that she’d never touch the “Puff -N- Stuff” again. “Baby, we’re free now.” With that, she spun around on her heel, exiting the self-righteous church forever. Sherry got into her beat up old, gray paint, peeling on the sides, ‘74 Chevy Nova and high tailed it out of there as fast as she could, “Dead Mans Party” blared on the radio as she sped off. It wasn’t even a minute later that she wished she never left the last of her stash with her headless, before he was headless, old boyfriend Drew. “ That fucker, how could he do this to me!” “ Damn it!” She flipped a bitch back to the church in hopes of retrieving her medicine before Melody got to it. “Tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll kick,” she chanted, snot profusely running down from her nose. She looked into the rearview mirror to a smirking Drew, waving a bloody reservoir. “Dirty is, what dirty does,” he said. Furious, she whipped her head around to rip him a new asshole, and as she did Sherry and her unborn child, (at last) entered into Drew’s dark world forever. The waiting was over.
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