Jessica Kent vs. J.D. Delay

 

Black Tar Kiss, Chapter 4

 

You ever hear that phrase snitches get stitches? Well, in my case, that’s provided I even make it to a hospital to begin with. That ambulance had to be haulin’ ass and doin’ all sorts of Motocross tricks across the highway to get me there on time now that word probably got out the minute I stepped on the concrete. Somebody would have heard about me ratting on Scar Tissue and White Snake. Whomever had their eardrums pounded with that information first would be the ones shanking me to death or putting bullets in whatever was left of my messed up brain. If it wasn’t going to be Scar Tissue and White Snake themselves, who would it be? The Bad Faith Actors Guild? The Monkey Slayers? The United States of Hitler? Any number of incel gangs rooting around in Bull Rope?

 

Nah, man. I didn’t see anybody in fedoras wanting to stick a knife in my guts. What I saw made me want to die. I’d been wandering around the city for a while not really paying attention to my surroundings until I found myself in a homeless district. A whole sidewalk lined full of ordinary people who lost every ounce of hope in their decaying bodies.

 

I saw a teen momma with a face full of dirt trying to bottle feed her little crotch goblin, if only he’d stop cryin’ his baby blue eyes out. Lord knew he had a lot to cry about not only in the present, but if he survived poverty and somehow made it into the future without dying of starvation.

 

I saw an old lady sittin’ in a scraped-up rocking chair trying to bundle up with every piece of fabric she had. Nothing would be thick enough to cover her skinny-ass body and she shook hard. The shaking might have had less to do with the chilly weather and more to do with drug withdrawal. I trudged a little further trying to hold back that stinging saltwater in my eyes.

 

And then I saw a pair of blistered and cracked feet hanging out of a cardboard box. I could barely see a chest rising and falling in there, but even that wouldn’t last forever in this frosty mess that we call weather. He didn’t have nothing but a torn up T-shirt on his back and a little paper cup with change jingling around in there. I wanted to give him a big wad of cash that I earned from wheeling and dealing with Black Tar Kiss, trading for ingredients to make that magical chewing tobacco. A wad of cash had nothing on a good homecooked meal and my heart sank to the bottom knowing it was already too late for him.

 

Seeing some shopping-cart pushers, some little kids in knockoff coats freezing their butts off, some old grandpa slumping around with a cane and not a single thing on his naked feet, not only did seeing these people put my weary eyeballs through hellfire and torture, but they reminded me of a meme I saw on the Book of Faces one time. It said, “You’re closer to being homeless than you are to being a billionaire.” A broken heart was the least of my worries. That meme was looking more like a reality the more I realized my money wouldn’t last forever. I could stay at a cheap-ass motel for a few nights, but then what? Right back on the streets to meet my new neighbors.

 

This wasn’t a neighborhood. It was a graveyard for people who still had something resembling a pulse. Old people and kids were among them. Old people and kids! My stomach growled and ached at the thought of these homeless folks dying a slow and agonizing death all because nobody would give them a bite to eat. They probably heard the unwanted advice of, “Get a job!” even though they already took it and still couldn’t afford shelter. Bull Rope ain’t no hippie paradise. This place was a death camp with no guards. Smelled like one, too. Made me wonder if the coroner had a steady supply of nose clips to go around, that was if he wasn’t too busy blowing snot out of it from all the tears he shed beforehand. Making a coroner or an undertaker cry took talent, but none of them talents translated into success in the job market. Squandered potential everywhere, though someone probably squandered it for them.

 

Speaking of squandered potential, as I was dragging my frozen carcass across the newspaper and plastic jug-covered sidewalk, who else but Scar Tissue popped up in my swimming head. Swimming was an appropriate way to describe it, because I just about sold my own pal up the river. This wasn’t just some wannabe thug who couldn’t cut it in the Mexican Mafia. Hell, he had no business in Black Tar Kiss anyways. This was a dude who played multiple instruments and had a love for heavy metal and hard rock. This was a dude who should have opened for Slipknot one year and headlined his own show many years down the line. He should have been slapping that bass and beating them drums all over the world from Italy to Japan to Brazil to back here in the US of A.

 

Why would a guy with all the promise in the world want to throw it all away just to hang out with incel thugs? During our time together while we were out of earshot from White Snake, he told me why. Truth was, he didn’t throw any of it away. His momma did. His batshit bipolar ass-beating momma decided her own hijo was a worthless piece of crap and smacked him around with her rubber slipper, damn near every night. Grades too low? Smack on the arm. Didn’t do his chores? Smack on the ass. Couldn’t get a part-time job at the pizzeria? Double smack on his thighs. Couldn’t walk on water like Jesus Christ? Breathed in and out? Dared to make a little bit of a fuss? Thwack, thwack, thwack! Apparently, physical punishment was a big part of Latino culture. It was so normal to his family that he would hear Mexican comedians on TV joke about it and think it was a high bar for parenting. If he complained about it, it would just bring about more beatings with the slipper. Or a leather belt. Or an open hand. Or a copy of the 2,000-year-old fantasy novel that my dad read a lot.

 

Speaking of Christianity, God bless Scar Tissue’s soul, because he tried to find an outlet for his trauma. Lots of them, in fact. He already told me he learned how to play drums from listening to The Warning. What he also told me was that he was a little bit lovesick for them three chicas. Every night he’d go to bed and have these intense fantasies about them girls. Sometimes he would open for their shows. Sometimes he would have dinner and lunch with them. Sometimes he’d hold hands with them and walk down the streets talking about this and that. And then there were those nights where his fantasies were…let’s just say, a little more involved. He was in love with all three of those sisters even though he never had the chance to meet them. Not once did they come to his home town. When Scar Tissue took the last beating he was going to take from that slipper smacking his bare ass and stinging the piss out of him literally, he knew The Warning weren’t coming to save him. He felt betrayed by three girls who never knew he existed. The sting of his ketchup red flesh outweighed the beauty of his lovey-dovey fantasies. When he first started communicating with White Snake over the internet, he jumped at the opportunity to run away from home and into the arms of an “alpha male”.

 

Everyone thinks gang leaders and Black Pillers like White Snake are just brainwashing and torturing random kids just so he can send them into battle to live out his own perverted fantasies. It was brainwashing, but he did it by giving us what we wanted and telling us what we wanted to hear. Before we joined Black Tar Kiss, we were nothing. No different from the gum stuck to someone’s shoe. No different from the diarrhea dumps in a public bathroom stall. No different from the tampons that soaked up more blood than we could dream of spilling in a gang fight. But once we joined up with him and got our names, we became badasses. We controlled the narrative. And if we worked hard enough in his ranks, we’d get better gangbanger names and all the money and chickies as far as our tear-stained eyes could see. All we had to do was reinvent ourselves. Get hard. Get tough. Pump that iron. Max those looks. Flex those muscles and macho man ourselves into the gang world. If anyone disrespected us, we would make them pay. If any woman turned us down, they’d be laying down and we’d be getting down.

 

Remembering Scar Tissue’s origin story must have been like taking a skewer to the eyeballs, because they were hurting like hell at this point. I wasn’t about to let out a whimper in case any of them thugs from The United Staes of Hitler or the Black Dragon Machineguns lurked around the corner. And then…some little lady did my whimpering and crying for me. Snapped me right out of my eyeball-murdering trance and made me realize I had been walking this whole time not paying attention to where I was going. My phone was buzzing like crazy, but I wouldn’t have answered it even if I was alert and alive. I had to give my dad credit, though: he wasn’t about to give up on the last of his bloodline. Maybe he should have, ‘cause I’d already given up on him and prepared myself for life on the street. A cardboard box was small potatoes compared to the spring mattress with the volume turned up to eleven.

 

After I had gotten my bearings, I turned my head and saw a group of chicks in yoga pants crouching on the ground attending to someone who shook and cried like she had just seen holocaust footage…in real time. These Stacies were supposed to be my enemy. This was a perfect opportunity to up my alpha male game and make them all obey. Lay them down and lay them good. Then my tummy got sour as I remembered all the misogynistic and pedophilic rhetoric that spewed from White Snake’s mouth like word vomit. Why the hell was I going to bat for him anyways? I never liked him past the point of getting me out of my hellhole of a home. These girls needed help and I needed a redemption arc in the worst way. I ran right over to see what the hell was going on.

 

Once I asked one of the women, she screamed, “There’s a guy going crazy in there! He just started wailing on us and yelling a bunch of nonsense about Black Pills! I don’t know what the hell is wrong with him!” Her speech got more frantic and she started stuttering at a million miles an hour as she held up her phone. “I can’t get any reception around here to call the cops! He’s still in there!”

 

She was spitting out information while my fried brain worked overtime to process it all. And out of the corner of my eye, I see that whoever was in there ranting and raving like an idiot had dropped his wallet, also like an idiot. I picked that sucker up and rummaged through it, hoping to find something resembling useful information. In between all the dead credit cards and dollar bills, there it was in all its glory: his driver’s license. That was definitely White Snake’s face on it, which looked like a prison mugshot with his wild eyes and serial killer frown. You know what else was on it? His government name. He never used it because he didn’t want me and Scar Tissue using ours. Our gangbanger names were our identities moving forward.

 

And speaking of moving forward, guess what bad decision I was about to make with my immature teenaged cerebral cortex? I tucked the wallet in my pocket and dashed into the yoga studio where all the chaos was happening and no copper could do anything about it because the reception sucked. Them yoga-hosers tried to plead with me not to go in there or do anything stupid, but selective deafness was a bitch and White Snake was about to become mine.

 

The yoga studio had exercise equipment strewn all over the floor like a stampede of horses just rushed through here. Busted windows, benches smashed in half, the reception desk had its cash box spilled all over the floor, and wouldn’t you know it, there was the devil himself. You’ve seen this movie a thousand times, so what did you think White Snake was doing with the chick in pink yoga shorts and blue sports bra when he had her by the brown ponytail? He repeated exactly what he saw at Battleground Park with Me Encanta Femicidio: he bent her over a bench that hadn’t been completely wrecked and spanked her apple bottom something fierce. Even the dialogue was relatively the same. SPANK, SPANK! “Naughty girl!” SPANK, SPANK, SPANK! “Bad, bad girl!” Repeating cycles was normal in his neck of the woods, obviously.

 

I could have ran over there and spear tackled him to the ground, maybe break a few ribs in the process. But I decided to hit him where it would hurt even worse. “ALLEX!” That got his attention in a heartbeat. He even let go of the chick he was spanking and she booked it out the shattered glass door. Getting shards between her toes and stuck in her soles was the lesser of two evils when the alternative was getting one more wallop on her butt.

 

“Allex Broker! That’s the name your momma gave you, right?!” And just like that, he stared at me like he wished he had a sniper scope in front of those coldblooded eyes of his.

Black Tar Kiss, Chapter 3

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Black Tar Kiss, Chapter 1

Well…now that I’ve got y’all’s attention and I ain’t letting it go anytime soon, you’re probably asking to nobody in particular, “What the hell is an incel?” You spend more time touching grass than most of us do, so kudos to you, cowboy. Bonus points if that grass is a slang term for something else. Speaking of slang, an incel is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”. Most of the dudes who call themselves this are a bunch of pissed off nerds who couldn’t get laid with a blow-up doll.

 

But if you join a street gang that calls themselves incels, you’re a different kind of dangerous. That’s what the three of us were. White Snake was our main man, Scar Tissue was his first pupil, and then there was me, Dogmeat, who got in the Corvette and pissed off from Sweetwater. Goodbye, Elijah Canterbury, welcome aboard, Dogmeat. Young, pissed off, and horny as hell. Can you think of a more dangerous combination than that? I guess Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms would be a close second place. Do those three things really belong together?

 

Yeah, it all sounded pretty good on paper during that three-month grace period. A bunch of horndogs looking for love in all the wrong places, who hoped to one day stick our Johnsons in the wrong places too. We weren’t about to let a bunch of neckbeards get in the way of those plans. We were the Alphas. The badasses. The trigger fingers that would make them all obey. Again, it sounded good in theory. But once you listen to White Snake run his mouth for three whole months, ranting and raving about women like a psychopath? It makes you wonder why this guy hasn’t gotten the 51/50 treatment. He was long overdue for a straitjacket, but maybe an orange jumpsuit was more of his style.

 

This is the part of the story I was least looking forward to telling, but in the interest of show, don’t tell, I guess I’ll have to suck it up and power through it. White Snake loved talking about what he’d do to a woman if he got a hold of her, all alone somewhere in a dark lobby. It’s simple, really: duct tape her mouth shut, pinch her nose until she was out of breath, wait for her to hit the ground unconscious, and once she was in dreamland, pull his jockey shorts down and…well, you do the math from here. Math isn’t a very popular subject among the student body these days, but even an “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader” contestant can get this one right. And then you’d ask yourself, how would a fifth grader know this?

 

Speaking of people who aren’t old enough to join the army yet, another thing White Snake couldn’t stop running his motormouth about was “pranking” little elementary school girls by chasing them down the street and laughing like a lunatic. Eventually, the little ones would fall and scrape their knees, but it wouldn’t be nearly as painful as listening to White Snake repeat something he heard on a Tik Tok video once: “I CAN’T MOVE ON! I CAN’T MOVE ON! I WON’T ALLOW MYSELF TO MOVE ON FROM YOU, BECAUSE YOU’RE ALL I WANT! I DON’T WANT NOBODY ELSE!” And just like that, the little girl would do something not even my old man could do: break the sound barrier with her screams of horror. You’re damn right she was scared! What’s she supposed to do, put a ring on it? White Snake might give you a different answer to that question than what a rational human being might give.

 

And then we segue from pranking to spanking. Remember, incels couldn’t get laid if they held a pimp for ransom. So what do they do to relieve their horniness? You know, when they’re not too busy harassing women and beating up other Reddit chuds? Pull it out and crank it up. I’ve done that a few times in my life and I’m pretty sure that was the reason for the fracas with my daddy. More on that later. But at least I had the sense to do it to women who had more qualifications than being legally able to smoke a cigarette and drink beer. White Snake had no shame. He dove to the bottom of the barrel like he was in the pervert Olympics. How low could he go? Low enough to where they can’t wear anything but a diaper and say little more than “goo-goo-ga-ga”. I actually said to him one time, “You know those are kids, right?” And he was like, “No shit, Scooby-Doo!” I don’t know what was more offensive: his hard-on for kids or the fact that he butchered the easiest comeback in the world.

 

Yep. This was our guy. This was the guy that would lead us to the promised land. The land of milk and honey, though his ideal girlfriend couldn’t produce milk yet. This was the guy who drove the Corvette down a freeway blasting bro-metal while Scar Tissue and I were sitting in the back chillin’ like villains. Every time I was trapped in a car with White Snake, I could have sworn some creepy crawlies were running up my arms and legs.

 

But Scar Tissue at the very least had something resembling potential. While White Snake was blasting that bro-metal from the stereo, Scar Tissue air-drummed along like he was loving life again. And this wasn’t just casual air-drumming. Scar Tissue actually looked like he knew how to play the drums. He did the tom fills. He pumped those bass and high-hat pedals. He drum-rolled on that imaginary snare. He crashed them cymbals at the right time. Made me wonder what he was doing hanging out with a couple of losers like us instead of playing in a heavy metal band.

 

I asked him on the spot, “Where the hell’d you learn to play like that, bud?”

 

He gave me the world’s cheesiest grin as he waxed poetic. “Three chicas, homie: The Warning! I got a hold of their CD’s, took ‘em for a spin, and let Pau-Pau beat them drums like they owed her dinero. They don’t teach that kind of drumming at my school, homes. You listen long enough, you figure it out.”

 

“Self-taught, huh? I respect that! You still got any of them CD’s?”

 

Scar Tissue shook his head. “Nah, man. Started to get the feels for them chicas, so I had to ditch them. I don’t simp for nobody, essa. They don’t give me the time of day. Too busy or something like that. So now I’ve got some old school Drowning Pool in my collection. Tear Away is a classic! Goddamn, I love me!”

 

Of course he says, “I love me”, because nobody else would. It was true for the songwriter and it was true for Scar Tissue unfortunately. That’s rule number one in incel ideology: when it comes to a woman’s love, you’re in the back of the line. You think we picked out these names Dogmeat and Scar Tissue? Hell no. White Snake gave them to us to keep us “black pilled” and keep us in line. You get too confident, you might actually get caught by one of these black widows. What’s more heartbreaking than a demeaning nickname like Dogmeat or Scar Tissue? Those are the kind of names that make you feel ugly. Maybe we WERE ugly, I don’t know.

 

And in case we forgot about that, White Snake turned his head towards us and said, “Hey! You guys making gay porn back there or what?”

 

“Sorry, essa. Won’t happen again.” Scar Tissue shrugged his shoulders at me while I just rolled my eyes. Gay porn? Really? The guy who pounds his pud to diaper-wearing kids is judging other people for making “gay porn”? I didn’t tell him that. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Remember, Black Tar Kiss was a gang. You mess with the leader or try to run away, they’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. Once you’re locked in, you’re locked in for life. It can’t be the same as before.

 

And speaking of things not going back to the way they were before, you’ll never believe who tried to send me a text message on my phone: Ben Canterbury a.k.a. my old man from Sweetwater. I pulled the phone out of my garbage bag of this and that just to see if it really was him. No question about it. He had been trying to contact me for a long time now and every time he did, I just let the call go to voicemail or delete the text entirely. Yeah, life with White Snake wasn’t so great, but going back home wasn’t an option, because that would suck even more. At least with Black Tar Kiss, I could make a little money and get a little honey. Can’t say that with a mechanic’s salary in little old Sweetwater.

 

“Who was that, Dogmeat?” White Snake asked.

 

“Nobody. Just someone I used to know,” I told him I the most pathetic tone imaginable. I guess we all had someone like that in our lives. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be joining street gangs. We’d be at home playing videogames or building Legos, at least that’s what I’d be doing. Kind of hard to play videogames when your old man says they’re rotting your brain. And it’s kind of hard to build Legos when your old man keeps calling you out to the living room to do some mind-numbing chores. I can’t even put on a heavy metal CD without my dad’s voice drowning out the guitar work.

 

Black Tar Kiss wasn’t a great option. It was the only option. That was made abundantly clear to me when White Snake got off the exit ramp and started driving towards Battleground Park, where our first real test as a gang would take place. Me Encanta Femicidio was waiting for us there. I had no idea how many of them there were or what they were going to bring to the fight. I didn’t even know how many of us there were. Were there other Black Tar Kiss members that were going to meet us or was it just us three? Do we at least have some guns or something? I don’t need an AK-47 or a Styr Aug or anything like that. A nine-millimeter would have been just fine.

 

Pardon me for having a million questions running through my mind before this battle took place, but…if I’m keeping it a buck with you guys…my heart was pumping, my blood was colder than a fishing creek, and the rumbling my stomach was worse than if I ate some bad fish from that same creek. Want some plain English? I was scared to death and I wasn’t about to tell Whtie Snake or Scar Tissue about it. Me Encanta Femicidio didn’t scare me nearly as much as White Snake did. And if I lost my rapport with Scar Tissue, that was it, man. If there was a god up there in heaven, I know I wasn’t well-behaved worth a damn in them pews at church…but I hoped he was looking out for me.

The Hateful Eight

MOVIE TITLE: The Hateful Eight

DIRECTOR: Quentin Tarantino

YEAR: 2015

GENRE: Western Thriller

RATING: R for violence, swearing, nudity, and rape

GRADE: Pass

A blizzard hits Wyoming in the middle of bounty hunter John Ruth transporting his $10,000 captive Daisy Domergue to Red Rock to be executed. After his stagecoach picks up two extra passengers along the way, Major Marquis Warren and Sheriff Chris Mannix, the travelers are forced to hunker down in a lodge together with other suspicious characters until the blizzard passes over. As the strangers get to know each other, not everyone can keep their stories straight and it leads to paranoid distrust. Bodies begin piling up until their paranoia tapers, which means Daisy’s chances of escaping execution increase even more.

Just like with any other Quentin Tarantino movie, every character is developed through realistic, gritty, and vulgar dialogue. It’s not just cursing and slurs for the sake of edginess. Everything said in this movie has a purpose and nothing goes to waste. This is especially true when Marquis is telling old man Sandy Smithers how the latter’s son died at the former’s hands. It’s also true when John Ruth tells stories about how he prefers to hang his bounties rather than give them an easy route to death. And it’s true again when Chris Mannix brags about his father’s renegade army of confederate remnants fighting for a dying cause. None of the characters’ back stories or present actions make them appear sympathetic, I’ll admit, but if we were meant to sympathize with them, the movie wouldn’t be called the Hateful Eight. This is classic Tarantino storytelling at its apex.

I also must commend the musicianship of Ennio Morricone, who provided most of the soundtrack for this movie. Whenever a feeling of impending doom or hard justice needs to be experienced by the audience, Morricone’s music will make them believe in the brutality they’re seeing onscreen. He has a legendary track record of providing fantastic scores for western movies, so recruiting him was a natural fit on Tarantino’s part. I’m not sure if the Hateful Eight’s soundtrack has been released as a CD or digital album, but if it hasn’t, then it’s a crime. Classical music never goes out of style and even if it did, it can always be revived by conductors like Morricone.

Tarantino movies could be criticized for dragging themselves out too long or being overindulgent in their exposition through dialogue, but in the case of the Hateful Eight, I don’t agree with that sentiment at all. Everything had its place. Every conversation had its own feeling of drama and excitement. If you watch Tarantino movies just for the brutality, you might have to wait a while, but it’ll be worth it in the end. Think of the conversations as the slow build and the violence as the major crescendo in a symphony of masterful filmmaking. I wouldn’t lump John Ruth punching and elbowing Daisy in with that symphony since it was disturbing to watch and out of context it would make John Ruth look like a jerk. Yes, your butt will go numb as you go through this two and a half hour long masterpiece, but when you’re kicking it in the Caribbean, you’ll be saying to yourself, “Marcellus Wallace was right.” Wait a minute, wrong movie! But you get the idea.

While this movie isn’t anything earth shattering, it is a piece of art to be admired and rewatched just to soak in the talents of everybody involved. Samuel L. Jackson was undoubtedly the show stealer when it came to the acting. Ennio Morricone’s music is always heaven on the ears. The story itself can be easily pieced together once the movie draws to its conclusion. All in all, there’s not much to complain about even with the lengthy screen time and the scenes where Daisy gets punched (despite the fact that she too is an unsympathetic villain). A passing grade will go to this modern day Tarantino classic!

Kink Floyd

“Cock-a-doodle-do, baby girl. Or as you like to say, any cock will do.”

Detective Tarja Hunter would have loved to smash the face of whoever said that to her, but the restraints on her arms and legs prevented her from doing so. Her sudden burst of energy after waking up saw her thrashing around in a standing spread eagle position. As her eyes adjusted to the studio light, she saw that she was wearing nothing more than a black leather thong with a skimpy bra to match. She also had a rubber ball gag obstructing her speech and causing her jaw to ache as badly as her pounding head.

She immediately recognized the two perverts standing in front of her. The one who made the rooster joke was Daniel “Kink Floyd” Alexander, a middle-aged man with long silver hair, tight black spandex pants, and a blue T-shirt with the screaming face from Pink Floyd the Wall with a ball gag in its mouth. The one standing next to him texting on his phone was straightedge gangster Johnny Filter, a puffy haired psychopath with a black leather vest and blue jeans.

Tarja continued to struggle in her chains and stare daggers into Daniel’s eyes, to which he said, “Sweetheart, don’t look at me like that, these pictures are going to be amazing. You’ve already got the body of a smoking hot supermodel, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.” The bondage enthusiast turned to Johnny and said, “For Christ’s sake, put away your phone, man.”

“What? I was just texting the captain, that’s all. Somebody has to let him know how much damage these pictures could do to his precious little precinct. Why shouldn’t it be me?” asked Johnny.

“Smart as a whip, aren’t you, Johnny?” said Daniel as he retrieved his telephoto camera. “Oh, these pictures are going to look fantastic. Okay, baby girl, smile for the camera! Oh wait, you can’t smile, because you’ve got a gag in your mouth. Yeah, sorry about that. Sorry I had to stick my ball in your mouth.”

Daniel and Johnny had a good laugh at that one before the latter said, “Don’t worry, Kinks, this isn’t he first time she’s had something that hard to swallow in her mouth.” The two perverts laughed like hyenas again while Tarja raged around in her bindings and growled at them through her ball gag.

“Ooo, I love it when they squirm around like that. They make for better pictures,” said Daniel as he flashed a bunch of pictures of Tarja’s angry misery. The more pictures he snapped, the harder the detective struggled and the harder she roared. “Look at those pretty eyes, Johnny. You picked a good one tonight!” Daniel took one last picture of Tarja, this time a close-up of her vicious, fiery face.

Daniel and Johnny both scanned through the pictures and grinned creepily. Kink Floyd said, “Okay, Johnny cakes, be a good little millennial and upload those pictures onto my computer. You know where my office is. I’ll be out here playing with my new toy while you’re doing that.”

Johnny took the camera and said as he was making his way to the back office, “Don’t have too much fun out here, Kinks! Territoriality; she was mine first!”

As soon as Johnny Filter shut the door behind him, it was just Kink Floyd and the helpless Detective Hunter, whose face was beet red with both embarrassment and anger. A little stream of spittle splashed from her bottom lip. She bit down hard on her gag as if she suddenly had lion fangs that could chew through flesh and bone. Daniel slowly approached her with a sadistic grin and gently rubbed the back of his leathery hand against her soft face.

“You know, Miss Hunter,” he said. “You may not realize it right now, but you’re doing a great thing for your community. Johnny Filter isn’t just any gangster. He’s a straightedge gangster, which means he only beats up drug dealers and neo-Nazis, the scum of our society. If your boss laid off of us like he’s supposed to, we could do his job better than any cop ever could, yourself included. Don’t get me wrong, honey, you’re a damn good cop. But Johnny’s brand of street justice is that much better. You should have been a model instead. Police work is so dangerous for someone as sweet and…” Daniel took a huge sniff of her neck. “…sexy as you!”

Tarja’s veins were ready to explode like dynamite as she thrashed and struggled some more in her chains. Daniel chuckled at her and said, “Sweetheart, what are you doing? I mean, really, what do you think you’re going to accomplish by squirming around like that? We’ve already got your best pictures. And now all that’s left…is to have dessert!”

The instant Kink Floyd grabbed a hold of Tarja’s g-stringed butt, the volcanic detective snapped the chains on her legs and wrapped them around her attacker’s neck, squeezing his airways in an MMA move known as the Triangle Choke. Now Daniel was the one struggling as he tried to pry Tarja’s legs loose and get some air into his lungs. His face turned purple, his eyes rolled backwards, and his body became limp.

Tarja let Daniel’s corpse drop to the ground while she struggled with her arm bindings. She let out powerful moans through her gag which prompted Johnny to say, “Kinks, what did I tell you about having too much fun?” from the back office. This fueled Tarja’s lava hot adrenaline even further and she eventually snapped the chains on her arms. As she was on her knees, she pulled the ball out of her mouth and took deep breaths while rubbing her jaw.

The detective slowly stood up and tiptoed across the hardwood floor into Daniel’s office, where, with his back turned to her, Johnny Filter was frantically typing and uploading the pictures onto the computer. “You need something, Danny boy?” said Johnny as he swiveled his computer chair around. The look on his face changed from arrogant sadism to horrified shock when he saw Tarja standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O’s” he said to himself.

“You’re damn right, you fucking pervert!” said Tarja as she charged at Johnny with a flying knee attack, catching him right on the bridge of the nose and busting him wide open. Johnny screamed and cried for help while Tarja kicked him repeatedly in the ribs and head. As soon as she felt he was subdued, the detective ripped the computer tower from underneath the desk and threw it roughly to the ground, shattering the hard drive into little chips and wires. Johnny laughed at her with blood in his nose and mouth before Tarja asked, “What’s so funny, you little shit?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. It’s just that…you’re too late! I already sent those pictures to your boss. As soon as he’s done creaming in his pants, he’ll start to understand just how important I am to cleaning these streets up.”

The realization hit Tarja like a super heavyweight boxer’s punch to the stomach. Her most embarrassing photos were now on the internet and everyone was going to ridicule and sexually harass her for the rest of her life. They would see her as nothing more than a “whore” and a “slut”, two words that got her eyes wet in a hurry.

“Now, back to business,” said Johnny. “Are you going to arrest me or what? I mean, you did beat my ass just now and that won’t look good as far as police brutality goes. Then again, your career’s already over, bitch, so you’ve got nothing to lose.”

Now it was Tarja’s turn to have a sick, sadistic smile on her face. “You know what? If I’m going to go out, I’m going out in a blaze of glory. And it’s going to be the biggest goddamn blaze of fire this city has ever seen.”

The disgraced detective grabbed a hold of Johnny’s vest and dragged him kicking and screaming out to the studio. He begged, pleaded, and whined for forgiveness, something he expected Tarja to do from the start while she was in kinky bondage. Instead, the cop shoved the ball gag in Johnny’s mouth, dragged him by the hair to a nearby window, and threw him through the glass. His muffled screams sounded off throughout the neighborhood as he fell to his doom, caving in a car that was parked on the sidewalk.

About this time, Kink Floyd was waking up and shaking the cobwebs off. Tarja scowled at him and said, “You’ve been found guilty of kidnapping an officer, extortion, and murder. The victim? Pink Floyd’s music! I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon, asshole!”

Tarja grabbed Daniel by his hair and dragged him over to a different window before chucking him through the glass and watching him crash to the concrete below. With both of her attackers smashed into pieces and dead as doornails, it didn’t change the fact that her career as a cop was over. She sat down in the fetal position and sobbed silently over her knees. The satisfaction of killing Daniel and Johnny only lasted for a few seconds. Now it was replaced with pants-pissing fear and stomach-burning anxiety. If she could throw two sociopaths out of a window, imagine what she could do to a sexual harasser. She wasn’t afraid of jail at this point. In her mind, she was already a prisoner of a cruel and sexist world.

Nadia Rinehart

NAME: Nadia Rinehart

AGE: 19

OCCUPATION: Street Fighter

CANONS: Hardcore Hell 2 and Chainblazer

As a staunch democrat, most of the characters in my story identify as politically liberal atheists. I’m not alone in projecting my views on my characters, because CJ Box and Carl Hiaasen do the exact same thing for their parties. Naturally, my conservative characters are few and far between. And yet, they do exist. Keegan Day from “Occupy Wrestling” qualifies. Gail Reinhold once held those beliefs and she was a hero. And now let’s add one more name to that small, yet growing list: Nadia Rinehart.

Before I changed her name to something that didn’t sound like a NASCAR redneck’s name, Gail Reinhold’s last name was Rinehart, which meant she was related to Nadia. Gail got her start in Hardcore Hell 1 and then a whole generation passed into Hardcore Hell 2, where we get Gail’s now grownup niece, Nadia.

During her time in Hardcore Hell 2, Nadia proved to be an even nastier version of her aunt when it came to brutal fighting skills and a general mean streak. She was part of a straightedge gang called Throw Down, Motherfuckers, which is a conservative parody of the real life gang Fuck Shit Up aka Friends Stand United.

If you smoked weed, shot heroine, drank vodka, or even thought about using the lord’s name in vain, Nadia and her boyfriend Johnny Filter were there to put you in the ICU. Punches, kicks, elbows, knees, and the occasional judo hip toss were employed by Nadia and her gang. No guns were necessary, because guns are for pussies (even though Nadia is against gun control).

By the time Hardcore Hell 2 went in the shitter after ten chapters, Nadia was recycled into another story entirely: Chainblazer, a cyberpunk neo-noir story where corporations turned ordinary people into mindless, yet ultra-powerful slaves by wrapping fiery chains around their wrists and ankles. Nadia’s role this time wasn’t a conservative gangster, but rather a criminal informant whose transgressions were minor compared to what she did in Hardcore Hell 2.

Then again, living on the streets with no parental supervision of any kind lent itself to a life dependent on the kindness of strangers. Nadia’s help as a CI led the two main characters, Rollin and Tarja, to the release of a corporate slave named Marcus McKnight, a muscle-bound black dude who was the prototype for those fiery chains. Marcus then revealed information to everyone that these chains were being mass produced and the corporation responsible needed to be raided. In the happy ending, Nadia’s reward for all of her help was being set up with a job and low cost housing. Not bad!

Chainblazer was yet another story that went ker-plunk before it even had the chance to be ripped apart by critics. The excessive number of plot holes, the no-selling of attacks, and the froufrou writing style led the story down the path of destruction. And this all means now that Nadia is once again without employment.

During her experiences on my word processor, she’s been both a villain and a hero. If I ever use her again, I’d want her to be the badass gangster bitch she was in Hardcore Hell 2 since that’s what I originally envisioned for her. She was great in Chainblazer, but too weak for my tastes. Besides, as I look at my unemployed character ledger, I have more female heroes than I do female villains. Get in line, Nadia Rinehart. You’ll see the light of day again.

　

***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“All marriages are same-sex marriages. Every night, it’s the same sex.”

-Bill Maher-

Savages

MOVIE TITLE: Savages

GENRE: Crime Thriller

RATING: R for graphic violence, gore, language, and sexual content (including rape)

GRADE: Pass

In the beautiful sunset strip of California, life is equally beautiful for Ophelia and her two lovers, a marine named Chon and a pacifist named Ben. The three of them grow marijuana out of their own greenhouse, peddle it, and smoke it while having the most mind-blowing sex imaginable. If life was really this heavenly 24/7, then Savages would have been a soft snooze fest.

It so happens a Mexican cartel run by the ruthless Elena Sanchez wants a cut of Chon, Ben, and Ophelia’s profits. When the cartel doesn’t get what they want, they kidnap Ophelia and bend the wills of Chon and Ben by threatening to kill and torture her. The two marijuana dealers have to pull every favor they’ve banked to both do business with and fight back against the cartel.

If you know anything about how brutal Mexican cartels can be, then you can appreciate the difficulty level of what Chon and Ben are trying to achieve. These gangsters will slash, rape, shoot, and immolate their way to a higher profit and they don’t care whose blood they spread across the desert sands. The title Savages could be a reference to the violence and hatred Elena Sanchez’s cartel brings to every battle.

Or the title Savages could refer to what Chon and Ben must become in order to do combat with these mafia thugs and live to tell about it. If the latter is the case, then they can’t just be an ex-marine and a lover-boy respectively; they have to be homicidal lunatics with their business and combat tactics. All of this gore and all of these guts over a beautiful woman who doesn’t deserve the draconian living conditions she’s placed under.

There are many reasons why somebody would like this movie. If you have a fetish for gore, that’s one reason. If you like to be frightened, the cartel gangsters can hook you up (maybe that’s not the best figure of speech). If you like a good story where the lead characters have to go through hell in order to earn their happy ending, then goddamn it, Savages has all of that for you. If you want to see some hardcore sex scenes, then Savages could be an iffy deal for you since the consensual scenes are brief and the rape scenes are disgusting. If you take a huge interest in gang culture, then this movie will give you paranoid thoughts about moving to either California or Mexico.

There’s something in this movie for everybody provided they’re at least 18 years old and are not genetically predisposed to psychological trauma. The chain whippings, blood splatters, fiery explosions, eyeball pops, limb slashes, body burnings, forced sex, and even Elena Sanchez’s slap across Ophelia’s face can all attest to how important movie ratings are.