Dark Day Dreams, page 6
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We came up with a background story for Sasha. She was to tell people she’d grown up in the same small Montana town as me and that we had known each other since we were kids. To be honest, it seemed like she refrained from getting involved in a lot of conversations…I’d done my best to educate her on the ways of the human world but there was just so much to know. I told people she was just very, very shy.
I enjoyed watching and listening to her as we drove back to southern California. She was amazed by so many things I’d come to take for granted…the freeway, the buildings, the different landscapes, how easy it was to get food. I had to laugh when she looked at wide-eyed and exclaimed, “You mean somebody else does the hunting for you?”
One of the hardest things for her to understand was the fact I made a living telling stories about life up on the mountain. She said, “Aren’t you worried somebody might go up there and do something to the family?”
I smiled and replied, “That’s the great part. The humans think I just made all this stuff up. They don’t believe anybody could possibly live like that in this day and age.”
“Don’t you feel guilty making jokes about us?”
“No, as far as the pure humans are concerned, our family is no more real than the characters on a television show.”
“What’s a television show?”
************
So we settled into our version of domestic bliss. I knew that eventually Sasha might get bored and we’d need to talk about some ways she could spend time away from me. I considered asking her if she might like to volunteer at the zoo but then realized how hard it might be for her to resist killing the animals. That’s just something pretty much hardwired into our kind. I started to worry that maybe bringing her to a large metropolitan area right away may not have been a great idea. After all, I was able to ease into pure human life by spending time in tiny Flettsville first.
She didn’t want to wear clothes and if anybody even slightly looked at us funny I sensed she was ready to tear their eyes out. I’ve heard other comics talk about having psycho girlfriends but they really have no idea.
One night we were out with another couple and referred to our apartment as a cave. Much to my amazement, the other two people didn’t even react. I guess they figured that was just a trendy new term they hadn’t heard before. That’s the dangerous thing about living in a culture where “new” and “cool” are pretty much the only standards anybody cares about.
I got back to work in the clubs around town. I didn’t focus so much on the beast stuff anymore and I was still doing okay. Hollywood (and southern California in general) is such a strange place…it was easy to come up with material about everything from Disneyland to health food crazes. We don’t mind laughing at ourselves and folks who live elsewhere in the country feel quite comfortable laughing at us too.
During two thousand eight I got an invitationto appear on the Tonight Show. That was quite a thrill. After I finished my routine, Leno even invited me to come over to the couch for the remainder of the show! I ended up sitting next to Martin Short, somebody I had idolized for years. What a nut.
After that night it seemed like I got way more attention whenever we went out on the town. Fans would stop us and ask for an autograph or to get their picture taken with me. I knew Sasha felt kind of weird about all this attention but she seemed to handle it pretty well, all in all. Or at least she did until a blonde model named Jessica Simon-Marks cornered me at a party we attended.
I have to admit she was probably the most stunning pure human female I’ve ever had a conversation with. I was at the bar getting us a couple of drinks when she sidled up next to me and purred, “So, I saw you on Leno. Very impressive, looks like you have the world in the palm of your hand these days.”
I chuckled and replied, “Yeah, I can’t complain. But we both know how fleeting fame can be.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “I have a feeling you just moved up to the next level, Karl…wouldn’t be surprised to see you get a movie offer in the near future.”
We continued to stand there and talk for a few minutes. Okay, I admit it was really more flirting than just talking. Unfortunately, Sasha (who was still waiting for her drink) noticed us from across the room.
A couple days later, a photo of Jessica and me at the party ended up posted on a celebrity gossip website. When Sasha saw it, she was furious. We were sitting at home and she said, “What the hell is going on, Karl? Do you want this female?”
“No, of course not. That’s the only time I’ve ever talked to her…they’re just trying to create news that has no basis in reality.”
“Well, you two look awfully comfortable together!”
She threw a small statue at the wall and stalked out of the room. I stood there and wondered if she’d ever be able to figure out how to live comfortably in the pure human world.
A couple weeks after that I needed to head up to San Francisco for a gig. Sasha said she wanted to stay home this time because she was burnt out on travelling so much.
When I returned to my hotel room from the club, I turned on the television. There was a breaking news story about Jessica’s body being discovered next to a road up in Laurel Canyon. She wasn’t just dead…her arms were also missing.
I called Sasha several times but just got her voicemail. When I got back to L.A. and walked into our place, I glared at her and said, “Was it you?”
She looked down at the floor and tried to come up with a story but it was obvious she was lying. I grabbed her by the shoulders and yelled, “You can’t dismember somebody just because they like me!”
Sasha was softly growling and tears filled her eyes. “I’m sorry but I know eventually you two could have ended up breeding. I could smell the pheromones clear across the room.”
Then she started sobbing and my love for her won out over my anger. I hugged her close to me and whispered, “We need to get you some counseling. Maybe even medication or some kind of anger management class.”
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It took a couple of years but Sasha gradually got comfortable living in my world. She joined a gym and began to exercise on an almost daily basis. It turned out the thing she needed most was simply a way to burn off the robust animal energy all we beasts are blessed with. As a matter of fact, her marathon times were so impressive I had to ask her to ease off a bit.
She also began volunteering with an organization that tried to find homes for abandoned dogs and cats. She tended to stay in the office, away from the part of the building where they kept the animals.
My career stayed on a steady uphill course. Jessica had been right…I was eventually offered a part in an Adam Sandler movie. It was just a few lines but it got my foot in the door, acting-wise. Then I did a sitcom on FOX that very popular during its first season and that ultimately led to me hosting Saturday Night Live on a March night in twenty eleven. Sasha was sitting with my agent in the audience.
I really hadn’t done any “mountain” bits in public for quite a while but the show’s writers asked if I’d be willing to do a skit based on that concept.
I felt kind of bad about it. I’d always mentally justified using the stories in my standup act because I figured I deserved a reward for enduring all those years when I lived in a cave and had to wander around in the forest naked. But here I was attempting to be funny with a bunch of pure humans dressed up in costumes, pretending to be my beast family. It was the first time I truly felt like I was mocking the ones I left behind all those years ago.
Sasha and I only stayed at the after show party for a little while. I told her I needed to get out and walk around the city, clear my head a bit. We went into Central Park and basically waited for the muggers to arrive.
The next morning a jogger discovered two bodies lying on the ground. Their heads were located sitting on the ground five feet away, facing each other.
************
When we got back home, we went out to dinner with a comic I’d known going on fifteen years. He asked me how I liked hosting SNL and apologized for not having seen the episode yet. And then he added, “I heard you killed out there.”
I just looked at my beloved Sasha and squeezed her hand.
Escalation
Jack Meyer was a tech billionaire who lived in San Francisco. For several years he’d been involved in the alternative energy field, working on solutions that would hopefully lessen mankind’s ongoing greenhouse gas problem.
He’d always been a naturally positive person, believing that deep down most of his fellow humans wanted to do the right thing. He was unusually well liked for someone who had amassed a fortune this large so quickly.
He and Catherine had met at a dinner party thrown by one of his female cousins. Since he wasworth so much money and not bad looking he always (a) expected to be hit on and (b) hesitated to take things much beyond the dalliance level.
Jack was attracted to her before the first words were even uttered. She was slender with fiery red hair, green eyes and pale skin. He walked over to where she was standing and patiently waited while she finished talking with an older woman.
He could tell she was immediately interested in him too. He had to hide a smile as he watched her continue to pretend to care about what the other woman was droning on about. Catherine was nodding her head from time to time and occasionally interjecting a “that’s so true” or “uh-huh”. This was why Jack almost never enjoyed cocktail parties…more often than not you found yourself trapped in a conversation with somebody who seemed to love nothing more than the sound of their own voice.
She was finally able to break away and they began talking. It turned out she was a writer who also worked part-time for a global organization that promoted women’s rights. She had met Jack’s cousin a couple years earlier at a conference and they’d quickly become fast friends.
After dinner they went out on the deck and drank wine. She admitted she had heard of Jack prior to the party but laughingly swore up and down it was only due to the fact she was friends with his cousin. But at this point he was so smitten he could care less even if he was the pawn in some elaborate love swindle.
They talked about where they grew up, where they went to school, places they’d traveled. They flirted and laughed. Time seemed to fly by and they ended up leaving the party together because they both knew this was wonderful and intoxicating and really kind of amazing.
They were married a year later and life was good. He was involved in a consortium that was working on fusion energy projects. She had just published a new book about novel ways women in the Third World were making their own lives better. The future for Jack and Catherine looked bright indeed.
Nine months after their wedding, she flew to Chicago to attend a conference sponsored by Emily’s List, an organization that supports pro-choice candidates.
A local man named Edward Parker also attended the conference. A week earlier, a security guard he knew from church was able to smuggle a modified AR-15 and ammo into the auditorium and hide it. Parker was able to gain entrance using faked documents that claimed he was a gynecologist from Pittsburgh.
The carnage was unbelievable. Fifty people died right away and another hundred or so were wounded. Parker was even able to take out three cops before it was over. There were dead bodies everywhere, almost all women. Blood on the walls, blood on the floor, enough smoke and used shell casings to make it seem like a scene right out of Iraq circa two thousand four.
And of course, the country had its usual schizophrenic reaction. Democrats and other assorted gun control advocates cried out that this had to be the turning point, this had to be the sign, this had to be the level of cruelty and pain and abject violence that would turn the tide and make us all see things in the same light. There were marches and vigils and Facebook memes and political speeches that thundered with righteous fury.
By this time, the Republicans and ardent pro-gun people had become so hardened on the issue they hardly even went through the motions. They believed they had won the argument and it really didn’t matter how many people were slaughtered in mass shootings in the future. They would not only hold the line on current gun laws but also were making plans to gradually loosen them even more in the near future.
And there were even extreme pro-life groups that quietly applauded the efforts of Edward Parker and his co-conspirator. As far as they were concerned, a hard but essential task had been performed by one of God’s truly faithful. There had been a cleansing, a firestorm that removed a substantial chunk of influential sinners who had previously supported the baby killing industry financially and politically.
When a Pentecostal minister from Georgia was being interviewed on talk radio, he said that while he in no way condoned the violence in Chicago it was also important to keep things in context. So many of the victims were obscene sinners in the eyes of the Lord, women who at some point in their lives became so full of hate and selfishness they forgot that there was nothing more important in the world than choosing to create new human lives and maintaining those pregnancies until the glorious day the babies entered the world.
Jack was intensely angry for a while and then became very, very sad. He joined several organizations that advocated for new gun control laws. He used his wealth and influence to contact Democratic politicians he already agreed with and Republicans he thought might still be keeping a bit of an open mind on the subject.
It turned out there were very few people left in that latter group. The ones he talked to expressed genuine sympathy regarding Catherine’s death but were also quick to point out there was no reason to punish responsible gun owners for the wrongs committed by “crazies” like Edward Parker.
He knew a lot of them truly believed that. And he also knew many of them were scared to death the NRA and other gun groups would go after them if they ever deviated from the official party line even just a little bit.
Eventually, Jack’s hot anger turned cold but it didn’t go away. He’d never really been that interested in the whole gun debate prior to the massacre in Chicago but now he was starting to feel like a bit of an expert on the subject. One night he sat down on the couch and drew up a diagram outlining what he thought of as “the pro-gun perspective.”
When a non-Muslim was involved in a mass shooting, he or she was just considered a disturbed person and there were no other relevant factors. Certainly not the fact they lived in a country where it was perfectly legal to purchase an unlimited amount of ammunition and weapons that could be used to swiftly kill and maim dozens of people with very little effort. The pro-gun people agreed that it was sad, but these things happen. Nobody promised us a rose garden. If John Wayne was still around, he would understand.
However, if a Muslim was responsible for the same kind of tragedy, everybody got a giant hard-on and all the conservative politicians started talking about who we should bomb first. And every other Muslim living in the country better get busy saying how sorry they are for something they had nothing to do with.
So, Jack turned away from the world for a while. He kept working because he knew if he didn’t he would most assuredly lose his mind. But he stopped watching the news and reading the newspaper and looking at Facebook. Because he felt like the madness of the debate and really the weight of the whole fucking world might just crack him wide open if he wasn’t careful.
His friends and family worried about him. But he pretty much cut off communications with anybody outside of work.
His cousin Tanya stopped by from time to time but he never really felt like opening up with her. One day he grew frustrated and said, “I appreciate your concern but this is just something I have to work through on my own. I hope time will seal up this hole in my heart but I also know there is really no guarantee that will ever happen.”
He did a lot of drinking when he was home by himself. He’d sit in the dark and nurse glasses of Jack Daniels for hours on end, thinking about his wife and how little time they’d been able to spend together. It felt like God had pulled a cruel joke on him…he was ridiculously rich, he’d met the woman of his dreams and now life barely seemed worth living. He got drunk to ease his depression but then booze wore off and he felt worse than ever. The cycle continued on and on and on.
Jack thought seriously about suicide. He had doubts he would ever feel anything like normal again. The grief was just so intense.
Eventually, the next presidential campaign rolled around. Jack was still feeling somewhat fragile but decided to go ahead and check out the first GOP television debate. He was really curious who had decided to throw their hat in the ring this time around.
It was the usual mix of braggadocio and bickering. Jack was amused how many huge changes the candidates promised to make the first day they inhabited the Oval Office.
But there were two topics that didn’t even come up…climate change and gun control. Jack took a swig of whiskey and thought about how strange it was that one of the two main political parties in the country felt comfortable being complicit in not only the potential demise of humanity but also the deaths of completely innocent people in the far nearer future.
As the campaign progressed there were media moments here and there highlighting how willing the different Republican candidates were to swear absolute loyalty to the NRA and the gun owners the group represented. An ex-governor made a speech in Omaha and at the end he was holding a Flintlock rifle in his hands, grinning and talking about how the gun made him feel like Davy Crockett. A female senator did a photo-op at a gun range in Virginia, proud to be seen wearing the clear shooter’s glasses and noise cancelling headphones. The CEO of an airline joked during an interview that maybe it was time for the “right” Americans to be granted open carry rights on domestic flights.
Jack started feeling tense. He knew he should probably be avoiding this political shit, shouldn’t be getting caught up in the whirlpool of words and images and lies and winks and nods. But he found he couldn’t help himself…it was like these people were on the screen literally telling him it was perfectly okay that Catherine and all the others had died in a hail of bullets.
