psycho mike

by Dee P. R. Kay

Birmingham, Alabama

“Just do it,” Serena said. He licked his thumb and touched the LSD crystal. The rush was instant and equivalent to 100 hits of acid. No-one tells you to clear your calendar for a fucking month when your future’s bleak. His apartment had been his sanctuary for about three weeks. Serena had been babysitting him like a mental patient, queuing-up such feel-good films as The Omen. They’d gone outside to smoke a joint and take the edge off, and a gaggle of goddamn neighborhood dogs—all black—had surrounded his beat-up Honda Civic howling up a storm. He went catatonic, and she’d dumped him in front of the ER. A little Thorazine and a sweet black nurse would keep him going thru the shit-show. Post-thumbprint, he was “Psycho Mike.” Post-thumbprint, she’d gotten scraped at the clinic. This was post-everything.

*****

Mike didn’t own a watch. The one clock he had in his shitty Southside apartment was always moving but never going anywhere. Just like him.

He sat in the tub, wrinkled, soaking, staring at the mildewed grout between the tiles. The water was tepid, the only indication of how long he’d been here.

He’d drink the bathwater Serena left, if he could, stubble and all, then scrub away her essence with Ajax. Boil notice or not. Now the water was yellow. Was it clean before? Didn’t matter—he’d spiraled again, and Serena was waiting for him at The Fountain in Five Points to bring back acid for buyers. Angst-ridden little fucks wearing grunge band tee-shirts. It was still the ‘90s last he’d checked. 

The phone rang and rang and rang. The answering machine picked up. Serena’s voice echoed from the other room:

“Where the fuck are you?!”

Click.

He threw on some Levi’s and a semi-clean black shirt, then wrapped ten tabs of blotter acid—stamped with stupid smiley faces—in tin foil he’d saved from a gyro place. The high school kids always came to Mike because his shit was “pure.” No strychnine, no surprises, no specter of death. If there was poison in your acid, he’d tell you, it was deliberate, not some chemistry mix-up. Nothing glued the LSD to the paper except greed. And now you’re trusting purity from a Psycho Mike? D.A.R.E program pigs in mirrored sunglasses, hands on hips, fearmongering in school cafeterias over octagon pizza lunches had been Mike’s best sales reps, pushing the strychnine myth. He’d heard Nancy Reagan was the fellatio fucking master in Hollywood, but her efforts as First Lady got re-directed to “just say no,” while Tim Leary saying, “just say know” was more like, “just feel something, anything” in the big nothing of it all.

He walked down to the Fountain in Five Points. A humid summer wind slapped a grimy bar napkin in his face. Scrawled upon it:

Schlepped in shackles

En route to the House of Death

The wayward exile

Scoops up one last handful of earth

At the crossroads of Yekaterinberg and Tyumen

Probably some drunk college kid besotted with Dostoevsky romanticizing the gulag and distilled Russian despair. He crumpled it up and threw it into a storm drain. Oblivious.

The wind didn’t cry Mary. Sirens wailed somewhere on Red Mountain near the museum, where the Devil had put dinosaurs here. He brushed the dirt off his shoulder and put one foot in front of the other ever onward to the Storyteller fountain, at the foot of Highlands United Methodist Church, a sculpture commissioned by a slain art dealer’s mama with Satan at its center and a gaggle of creatures on lily pads in rapt attention to whatever shuck ‘n’ jive he was spinning—a magnet for dope dealers and 304s and junkies. This was the Magic City, after all.

The city wallowed in its own vomit on top of a slag heap of indifference.

A punk show had just finished at Frankie’s and the skinheads and sharps spilled into the streets—two sides of the same working-class coin too stupid to direct their hatred at the rich then slaughter each other afterwards. We couldn’t all just get along, and it was just a matter of time until shit jumped off tonite.

The Fountain was a cop magnet now—everyone knew it. Deals went down in dark alleys and back lots. He caught sight of her in a parking lot off Eleventh Avenue South, a vixen under sodium lamps, leaned up against a tan 1985 Monte Carlo booming Alice in Chains, the subwoofer raping his eardrums, the glare of the lights and grunge triggering a kaleidoscope of white-hot hate--a memento of psychedelic perdition from his month-long thumbprint trip--her voice warping into a warbled tornado siren telling him to chill as he threw the foil pack of acid in the kid’s face and told him to shut that shit off, the kid smirking as he punched the entitled little fuck in the throat until there was a symphony of gagging and choking and spitting bile before the death-rattle encore cued pigs to the scene like a Pink Floyd concert, replete with sirens and red and blue lights dancing in his dilated pupils, thrown to the pavement and handcuffed, he thought about that fucking bar napkin and Big Yella Mama awaiting him on death row.     

BIO: Dee P. R. Kay is not a person.

They’re a collective of alters—fractured voices with one pen.

Not a HIM.

Not a HER.

A THEY.

And THEY are not okay.

You won’t be either after reading WE DAT.

It’s their first novel.

Buckle up, baby.

Thank you!

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