The Gods Besotted

The Gods Besotted

by

Matt McGuire

Sixty fuckin' shots. I must have done sixty fuckin' shots the night that we all went down to the Wash and Go to see Scratch Adams do his dance.

We were all out on the town, mobile and Aristocratic, five cigarettes lit apiece in the wasted high school fashion, sporting our soccer gear. Everything that didn't have the name of a European football club on it was acid washed, dirt washed, or just plain dirty. It was me and Flack Jackson in his red Toyota truck, followed by Johnny G. with a carload of cheerleaders and prostitutes (as usual), then Red Sunday with some underpaid crack dealers and a German exchange student named Himmler who was staying with Red's family for the season. After that came a train of Sophomores and a middle aged baldy with a hard dick and some candy.

"You think we're gonna get in trouble? I don't want to tangle with the cops again. Hey, you see the tits on Amanda? She ever wear a bra that fits? Damn, I really don't want my Dad to find out that we're up to this shit."

Flack was apprehensive. I knew that once he got into the bad stuff like I was he'd be in the middle, donkey kicking and bucking his share of cops or come what.

"Duuuude, I don' even give a shit! Scratch gonna fuck this shit up. Simmer down and turn up that daaaaammn pimp shiiiit."

I was too sober to feel bad and too drunk to feel. Normally I was the first one in line for the Students Against Getting Arrested club, but tonight I had thrown my conscience and my mom-paranoia to the wind and was damned sure gonna participate in some hilarity.

Ten pairs of headlights pulled in, two at a time, to the Wash and Go Carwash, some screeching in sideways, burning blacktop that was no longer black, but gray like the cinderblock walls of our destination. Several crimes had been committed at the Wash and Go over the years, including two murders and a multitude of drug deals. Nestled on the side of town where the cops didn't go unless they had to, the Wash and Go was the perfect place to fuck or fuck up, and as we all exited our still shining vehicles the smell of stale gutterbeer, Broyhill Incorporated sawdust and hot air permeated the place like Sunday Skin Bracer.

That's when Scratch appeared. In his old gray Chevy Nova, Scratch came tearing into the Wash and Go with a bootleg, hanging out the driver's side, slicking his eyebrows back with one hand and slamming into a block flower planter full of cigarette butts and spent beer cans, sending a spray of radiator juice and automatic transmission fluid flying into space. Smoke came boiling out the hood of Scratch's Nova and wreathed him like a rock star as he flung open his haggard driver side door, his hazard lights blinking out of sync, revealing our disbelief in an orange glow at just how much this guy didn't give a shit about anything.

Nothing.

"Well Goddamn."

That was all Scratch said as he passed us by, two at a time, us lined up like a red carpet reception, him with one pant leg rolled to the knee, puffing on an unlit Black and Mild, winking at the ladies and slicking his eyebrows back again with his fingers done up in Tha Horns.

I prodded Flack Jackson, who was bent belly over in laughter, to go turn up his truck riders. Johnny Golden, who somehow had his letter jacket tentacles around four girls at once, said,

"Play some Skynyrd, goddamnit, and quick before the damn cops come. I'm gonna go over in the bushes for a few, but I'll catch Scratch on the flipside!"

Johnny left to the right, high-fiveing the very girls he was taking to the bushes, shouting lines from Top Gun and swilling a Busch Light Draft.

The attention shifted quickly from Johnny G back to Scratch, who had now positioned himself in the middle of bay number 2, doing samurai swordplay with a dry nozzle, shouting KEEYAH with every feint and pretended decapitation. I was on the ground now, leaning on my left arm, a bottle of something clear and strong between my fingers, slurping greedily at it as if it were the stuff of life and I a god besotted.

After pumping up some Sweet Home way past the legal limit, Flack joined me on the ground for the show, dragging by the hands two Sophomore girls who had never tasted man nor Beast, and they all came down in a pile beside me, Flack groping their breasts and me grasping my bottle, lest the well run dry before sunrise.

Red Sunday, who was always a party to witnessing an abomination, ran around the parking lot, flapping his stuff out of his pants, yanking on it and doing the Mick Jagger chicken dance, head bobbing and him hooting like a daemon, his namesake red hair catching the headlamp rays and turning from scarlet to burnt orange and back again, the full moon above frowning down on the whole scene as Scratch bellowed for Himmler to
insert a quarter in that godblasted shit trap so's he could get his dance on!

Heinz Himmler obeyed, in his German existentialist sort of way, like this was all something he'd seen a dozen and a half times before, done to much trendier music with better looking people in a country that didn't reek of sawdust and bad American booze. Himmler let the quarter trap slam home and then goose stepped back to the background, replacing his headphones to his unkempt ears, returning to the world of Einstürzende Neubauten and his pocket copy of Sein und Zeit.

As the first rays of spray began to fly from Scratch's magic wand, Flack and I, who were smothered under a patchwork quilt of Sophomores, sat up and began to cheer. Red Sunday began to pogo dance, hooping like a savage and yanking his orange-bearded meat, running up behind a bespectacled and terrified Freshman girl, who had never dreamed of such savagery, and began to hump her from behind, pogo-ing still, with the Freshman girl submitting because, well, it just wasn't cool not to submit if you were a Freshman in the company of Titans.

The first notes of Voodoo Chile rang out, the chow, chow, chow, chuntnunth chow as Scratch began doing his Madame Butterfly, his love maker rain dance with the wand, twirling it above his head like a Bo stick and then running it between his legs, shooting pressurized townwater out upon us and then sticking the wand down his pants, all the while slicking back his eyebrows with his devil horn hands and waving his arm over his zero-one-two fade, gyrating his hips like a carwash cowboy cum bullbreaker.

The hilarity reached a high note when Scratch removed his t-shirt and began his shower proper, running the wand up and down his already soaked body as if he were an Irish Spring model, Flack and me guffawing, Flack buzzing now on vodka and freer till the oldster baldy, who happened to have a CB radio and friends on the police force, shouted over his bullhorn that the COPS ARE COMING, THE COPS ARE COMING!

General disarray ensued, Flack dragging me by the shirt collar to his truck, me killing the rest of the bottle and flinging it into space, wet Sophomore titties bouncing into the back of Flack's truck, Red Sunday snatching Himmler by the hair, forgetting about the crack dealers who were long gone anyway with some unsuspecting Junior, the oldster shouting orders at us through the bullhorn as if he were a drill instructor and we were green cadets.

I suppose that oldster really was friends with the po-po, because as we were all clouds of black tar smoke out of that joint, he stayed behind to cockblock the fuzz. We had been blazing down the pavement for a few miles, relieved to have escaped another run-in with the law, oblivious to the shivering Sophomore girls in the back, when Flack and I looked at each other and simultaneously shouted, SCRATCH!

"We gotta go back, man."

Flack was genuinely concerned and about to backtrack when a sheet of sparks and flame came barreling past us, somehow taking up both eastbound lanes and the turn lane.

Scratch Adams, He Who Dances With Carwashes, was doing ninety down highway 18 on four bald rims, a trail of fire in his wake, black smoke boiling from under the hood of his gray Nova, radiator fluid and other assorted mechanical juices lubing everything but what they were designed for, his left hand raised out of the driver's side window in a middle finger salute to the law, the land, the moon and your mother, because Scratch Adams didn't give a fuck about a damn thing.

Nothing.