Dextromethorphan/Motel Saturday Night

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Motel Saturday Night

by Brian DeVere

This story was written entirely under the influence of drugs, mainly dextromethorphan (DXM). Let this serve as a warning to those who are thinking of dexing and writing. This could be the kind of thing your brain on drugs would produce. The story was submitted to and read by a classmate and recently published novelist. When asked what he thought of it he said, "I thought it was really fucking stupid."

Lou had worked at the motel for years. Too many years, it seemed, to some people, because even the chubby guy with the bad comb-over who screwed call girls at the motel every Friday night had started to pick on him. It started out pretty mild, with stuff like, "Whoa! Are you still workin' here?" and "Geez! Get a real job, Lou!" and had gone on to really hurtful remarks such as, "Are you auditioning to be a gargoyle in this filthy place?" Mr. Comb-Over even had the balls to ask Lou if he enjoyed cleaning up the jissom in the rooms, particularly his. Lou just pinched his face up and stared while the guy strolled down the hall laughing. Lou knew he had to control his anger. He'd done time in jail for public urination, public intoxication, and the use of profanity in a state park, and he didn't want to go back.

Lou was 56, balding, athletic, but ugly. His lime green coveralls didn't help his appearance at all. He would have chosen a manly navy blue, but the manager enjoyed humiliating him as well. He also had a prosthetic leg. He'd been drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight for his country. Once he'd arrived there, he didn't remember anything back home worth fighting for. Everyone he'd ever known had, in varying degrees, made his life miserable. So he snorted up all the China White he could buy, and he spent time with as many prostitutes as his quantity of money would allow.

As for combat, Lou was a natural. In high school, it had been "Lou against the world," so to speak. He was considered an outcast ever since the popular boys caught him getting a blow job from a retarded girl in the bathroom at his junior high school. It was really a very special moment for the two of them, who needed love so badly. Anyway, Lou got into a lot of fights. He lost most of them, which is why he kept getting into fights. The bullies of his town got their jollies by continually beating him up. They liked to call him the "Tardfucker," which contributed to Lou's rage and desire to maim people, no matter how hopeless his situation seemed.

And so, Lou loved killing the Vietnamese in their own humid, reeking, ripe backyard. He liked calling them "zipperheads" and "gooks," and he especially liked to place playing cards on the dead bodies of those he killed. He even saved a Viet Cong captain's right testicle in a jar, preserved with vodka. Lou was about to sign up for his second tour of duty when he was approached by the CIA.

The man from the CIA didn't look like Lou's idea of a spy. He was young, not much older than Lou, it seemed. He wore all kinds of camera equipment on his belt, around his neck, on his shoulders. The equipment almost obscured the ugly, sweat-stained Hawaiian shirt he wore.

Lou didn't know it, but the CIA man also had a camera in his penis.

Navy surgeons had removed his right testicle and replaced it with a testicle-shaped camera, the lens of which peeked out of his anus. He cleaned the implant's area scrupulously each day with vodka. The U.S. government had spent a lot of money developing this technology so that gifted uro-genital surgeons who could construct a penis out of almost any epithelial tissue could implant a device in a man which would, when operating properly, take a beautiful, full color picture if the man were naked, bent over with his ass in the air and squeezing what used to be his right nut.

And so, Lou went to the Philippines. They needed his expertise--his cool headed urge to kill brown people. The Muslims on Mindanao, that big southern island in the Philippine archipelago, had always been a very deadly threat to the government in Manila, which was Catholic--at least for the sake of appearances. Lou took up with a local girl there who insisted that if you weren't a Catholic you would go to Hell when you died. She elaborated upon this worldview with awful sincerity at a local batchoy and beer place with outside seating.

"Luís," "Listen to me! When you die, you go to a place where big, stinking carabao penises are shoveled up your ass all the time! Take me to America where I can honor Santo Niño with American candles paid for by American dollars!" Lou had never understood Marisa's fascination with Santo Niño, the Filipino representation of Jesus that looked like the cheerfully grinning Big Boy restaurant statue, dressed in pontiff's robes.

Lou looked into a nearby nepa hut and saw a hairy ass and legs fumbling around going, "click, click, click." His girlfriend, who was good at playing cool when weird stuff went down, acted as if she didn't see the hairy ass. She proceeded to pull a jar of Vaseline out of her bag and started to rub it into her vagina, under her clothes. As she did, a ping pong ball rolled out of her purse. She was a prostitute, and had to go do what prostitutes do. Lou was contemplating suicide when she began to speak in a more serious tone. "Lou-lou, when you are ready to quit embarrassing me in front of mi familia and get a real job, find me. Otherwise, find someone else to pinch your nipples and shove chopsticks up your ass!"

"But I have a real job! It's just secret!"

"Do you know how many times I've heard that bullshit line? Do you? Pitoy mo!"

"What?" The sound of a helicopter, which had been customary, even comforting, became annoying, and then drowned out all sound. Lou looked up, and for a moment most of his visual field was occupied by a Danish Modern Stewart plaid couch, which was supposed to be on its way to an Army General's office. Suddenly, at the snap of the last wire holding it in place it collapsed onto Lou and his batchoy and he bled pints from his right popliteal artery into the Stewart tartan, the tartan that was Lou's by right to wear as a Stewart, for that was his surname.

The couch was bulletproof, which is why it was so heavy and harmful to Lou. Some people think of couches as places to sit with friends and talk, or sleep, and sometimes even make love, but no one had ever thought of a couch as a weapon whose mass could cause such destruction. Luckily, the bare-assed CIA man had finished what he was doing, put on his clothes, and rushed to Lou's aid, making a tourniquet out of a strip of his florid shirt and a soup spoon. Lou would never see him again. The helicopter crew had dropped orange and red smoke bombs to mark the site where they could retrieve their couch, not even concerned with Lou, probably not even seeing him, and the air had a hue usually reserved for circus tents. Lou thought it looked like cotton candy and reached out to touch it, which caused the couch to shift, crushing his right testicle and bringing him sweet unconsciousness rather than sweet candy.

Lou awoke drugged. He vaguely remembered a wisened old brown doctor putting a mask on his face, smothering him with heavy, sweet vapors. All he could see now, though, were Filipina nurses, one of the country's finest exports of human capital, who moved efficiently in and out of Lou's ward. Lou managed to croak out, "Where Maaaa... flip whore?" meaning that he wanted to see his girlfriend. The nurse who was changing his I.V. bag thought that this comment was directed at her, so she pinched him viciously on the neck and called him a "stupid kano." Lou wanted to speak to the doctor to find out what had happened to him, so he called out, "Where's that sonofabitch L-B-D? I want that L-B-D in here right now to tell me what happened!"

One of the primary functions of the U.S. Government was to compress the long names of bureaus and departments into acronyms and abbreviations. It almost seemed that an organization was doomed to failure if it didn't have a good, punchy acronym. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is a good example. "BIA" to many people sounds more like a disease or some dirty sexual act than a workplace. Lou was just using the slang the CIA man had taught him. LBD to Lou meant "little brown doctor," a useful term to distinguish native physicians from U.S. military or other doctors of European descent. The other patients and staff in the ward, however, thought that Lou was screaming, his voice still slurred with anesthesia, about LBJ, or Lyndon Baines Johnson, graduate of Southwest Texas Teacher's College and President of the United States. And so, the whole ward erupted with shouts for and against LBJ in English, German, Tagalog, Visayan, and numerous other languages. Lou was quickly sedated and when he awoke, a sweaty major with unusually long nose hair explained to him that the President was very upset with him, and that his military record would be changed so that he could only find meaningless, dead-end employment for the rest of his life, so help him God.

So that was how Lou ended up working at the motel. He chose the motel business because of its anonymity, but Lou felt that people were catching on and that he was becoming known. This feeling Lou had coincided with a convention of Filipino doctors who had booked all the rooms at the Motel Saturday Night. Lou knew what he had to do. He needed something that would give meaning or completion to all the things that had befallen him. He decided to kill some Filipinos with a couch.

It was heavy work, getting an extra-long couch from the Presidential Suite and hefting it onto a balcony on the fourth and highest floor, but Lou did it, just as the women's auxilliary were having piña coladas and doing the Macarena in the gaudiest outfits a certain bakla could design. Lou was so happy he had tears in his eyes as he shoved the couch up over the balcony rails, but his tears of joy soon turned into tears of rage as a helicopter flew near. Lou thought he saw a thousand points of light refracted through his tears, but it was just one big spotlight, glaring like the eye of God. "Stand down, Sergeant Stewart! Do not throw that couch over the balcony!" cried a voice in Lou's wilderness of pain and fear. Lou was just about to tip the couch over the edge when a federal agent smacked him upside the head with a leather bag full of lead balls.

When Lou awoke, he was in an oak-paneled office, guarded by Marines, staring at the Vice President of the United States of America. "Lou, do you know why you're here?" asked the Vice President.

"Because I tried to kill a bunch of Filipinos with a couch?"

The Vice President chuckled. "That's a good answer, Lou, but it's not one I would have given. No, Lou, you tried to kill a bunch of constituents and campaign contributors. Now, normally, as a citizen of Texas, you would have already been given the honor and privilege of being put on death row and given thousands of hours of hurtful, invasive, and inaccurate national news coverage. However, I have decided to restore meaning to your life." The Vice President paused, looking at Lou.

"Thank you, sir," Lou said.

"I thought you'd see things my way. I've decided to reinstate you into government service and tell you a little bit about why that other couch put you on the sidelines for the last few decades."

"Why?"

"In a word, natural resources."

"Huh?"

"Petroleum, Lou. That helicopter had to jettison its cargo, including one bulletproof couch, because it--pay careful attention now--it ran out of fuel."

Lou was incredulous. "You mean I wasn't a target?"

"Not at all. You were a victim of petroleum shortages created by the very people who were financing the people who were backing the evildoers we sent you to kill. Now we're going to send you back so that you can prevent this from happening to other young men, and women now, who fight for our National Security every day by making our world safe for the retail sale of petroleum products. The Vice President stood up, walked over to Lou, and put his hand on Lou's bowed head. Lou looked up, his eyes rimmed with tears which formed a halo through which he could see the Vice President smiling beatifically like Santo Niño.

"Thank you so much," Lou sobbed.

"Welcome back, my son."

The Vice President motioned towards an overstuffed couch and bade Lou to sit down. "We have a lot to talk about, you and I," he said.