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Symphony Strain

Two 10-year-old boys are sitting in a park surrounded by trees, a field of long green grass, and the sun almost peeking its face out of the rain clouds. There is some Led Zeppelin music blaring out of someone's garage down the street. They are sitting Indian style, staring at each other. One of the boys (Chester) is missing one of his hands from where his now in prison father chopped it off years ago. The other boy (Felix) has a bucktooth smile, and an inbred face, much like the rest of his family.

"Do you know how a women gets pregnant?" Felix asks.

Chester laughs at him, giving him a look of stupidity.

"Everybody knows that."

"Well, how then?"

"Promise you won't tell my little brother (Arnie)?"

"If you don't want me to." Felix responds.

Chester looks around the empty park, getting close up to Felix's ear.

"A man pees blood into a girls pee hole," he whispers, his hand cuffing Felix's ear.

"How do you know? That sounds stupid to me."

"It's true," Chester says, pulling some grass from the earth.

Chester stares at Felix's smiling face.

"Hmm, I don't get how a man pees blood."

"Me neither."

"I can tell you something I bet you don't know." Says Felix.

"I doubt it," Chester says, still smiling.

"Did you know that black people shit white turds?"

Chester starts laughing.

"That's a bunch of bullshit, where did you hear that?"

"My older brother (Curry) told me that because white people shit brown turds, that black people shit white ones. It's true Chester, don't laugh."

There is a rainbow of not yet known colors forming over a mountain. Felix and Chester stop laughing, and the first drop of rain falls onto Felix's nose.

Two jobless twenty something's named Lenny and Vince are mixing their heroin into watered spoons. Lenny has tattoos all over his arms. His arms used to have strong healthy veins bulging from his pale white skin. Now there are just tattoos of skeletons, and a symbol of life. Vince is still a rookie at the game of smack, but has been sneaking into the carnival without a ticket for quite a while now. He may even get his clown make up soon. The cottons are soaked, the juice extracted, the needles inserted. The world doesn't exist anymore. It's just this moment in a melting space of warmth.

"I love this shit," Vince stammers, in a slow motion voice, as his entire perception of existence changes to a soothing relaxed state.

Lenny stares into his eyes.

"What?" Vince asks.

"I used to love it too, until it became an addiction."

"Addiction, asmiction, affliction, zasinction, it's a ~ZonkZest~ of pleasure any way you slice it my friend."

"You just don't get it, do you? I'm already dead," Lenny says, grabbing Vince's arm.

He holds Vince's arm up to his eye. A tear falls into the bloody hole on Vince's scar-like nucleus. Hank Williams Sr. is playing in the background, as crackheads fill the room with sweet smelling smoke. There’s a prostitute out on the street yodeling a song, as the thunderclouds strike down.

Two old punk rockers (Jimmy and Peter) are drinking Jim Beam in an ancient cabin hidden in the woods of Michigan. GG Allin's song 'When I Die' is playing out of some rusty old broken tape player/ radio. They have no electricity, just candles lit, and the glow of the moon against the glistening lake outside their back window. Cobwebs fill every corner. They sit in lawn chairs, staring out at the world around them. One has ulcers. The other has a broken heart.

"I miss my dead cat."

"Ya, me too."

"I miss my girlfriend."

"Ya, me too."

Jimmy gives Peter a strange pissed off look, but doesn't say anything. He lets it slide off his slippery soul, like a squirming fish in Vaseline hands.

"This lake makes me feel calm inside."

"Ya, it's nice to be away from the city."

"We should go fishing, take the boat out, bring our drinks."

"Sounds good to me, let me go grab the poles."

The drunken punkers zoom out into the empty secluded lake. He cuts the engine; they cast out into the dark. One of them gets a bite. It takes both of them to pull what ever it is, up into the boat. It's a rotting human head with hollow eyes, a hook coming out of its cranium, attached to a chain, with a heavy piece of gold on the end.

Two young girls (Tara and Leslie) are playing with dolls in a suburban room in the middle of suburbia. One has asthma. The other has a growth growing out of her forehead. The doctors aren't quite sure what it is. Her parents have spent a fortune on different physicians, each one with a different answer. They are both in Sunday church dresses. The room is covered with Back-street boys, Leonardo Decaprio, Michael Jackson, and Travis Bickle posters.

"I don't think I like this doll."

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's ugly, its not pretty."

"So, go flush it down the toilet then."

"Ok, I think I will."

"I like your other dolls though."

"Me too."

'My parents aren't home, lets go eat their ice cream and look inside their closet."

"Ok, let me go flush this ugly one down first."

"Ok."

A Walt Disney classic song called 'The Silly Song' plays from a Fisher Price tape player. More yodels come from the silence of the valley.

A couple of married 30 something's (Rod and Kerrie) are having a picnic in a rich park close to their safe house. Rod is having an affair with his secretary. Kerrie has always thought she was a man trapped inside a women's body. Kerrie is pregnant for the first time. Their new puppy (Aldo) is running around in circles in front of them, chasing his own tail. The small radio between their bodies is playing Mozart. They are in love. They work for the government. Kerrie's ass cheeks look like two basketballs put together. Rod is enjoying his penny loafers. They are eating crackers and cheese, with pickled onions, sipping on port.

"Have you thought of what we should name our first child?"

"I'm not sure yet honey."

"What do you think of the name Nicholas."

"Everyone would just end up calling him Nick, too plain for me darling."

"How about Timothy?"

"Everyone would just end up calling him Tim."

"How about Jonathan?"

"Do you have any creativity at all, Kerrie? Sometimes I wonder."

"You can be such an asshole."

"You know the Lord doesn't allow cursing!" Rod screams, slapping his wife in the face.

A 45-year-old man (who calls himself ~ZonkZest~) is sitting in a small room on the outskirts of a backwoods railroad crossing. He has been smoking crystal meth for 5 days straight, playing a violent video game (Half-Life) while chain smoking ganja. A bottle of whiskey is sitting next to him. There is no music playing. Just voices in his head. Voices that drive him insane. Voices he has never been able to control. His long scraggly gray locks of hair curling around his 10-day scruff of facial hair. There is no music. He has only one leg.

"I'm going to tell you voices in my head, that you are going to listen to me for a change."

Zonk hops around naked, screaming, whispering, too scared to look out his window.

"You got that!

”I know you can hear me!

”I know where you get this! I know everything the universe has to hide! The marbles of irrelevant relevant chunks swimming in the sanctity of everything you ever meant to my aura can’t escape this tuneless tune of despair! There’s no fucking plot to this day to day living!" a bible starts flapping around his room, like an out of control bat.

~ZonkZest~ pulls out his old Vietnam vet army outfit. He hears helicopters now. He hears the screams of a million frightened young boys in a jungle of flashbacks. He was never in Vietnam. The voices have convinced him he was. He is actually only 30. He doesn't have gray hair. This is the time machine of his future. He delivers pizza for a living on mars.

All these people live on the same planet.

A heated spot on a Texas map.

Everybody needs a slurpee on such a hot day. Maybe a strawberry flavored one, a banana cream vanilla one, a purple grape tang one, a Coca-Cola mixed plum flavor, a sour lime salted tomato juiced one.

A man from Iran is working at the counter of a 7-11 store.

He is poor and sad, yet holds a job down somehow, and manages to wake up breathing every morning. He is listening to a blues show on the radio. Some blind old man from the Delta is singing.

All these people, except ~ZonkZest~, walk into this 7-11.

Chester is in the bathroom. He turns on the sink to wash his one hand; a stream of blood comes gushing out of the faucet. Felix accidentally walks into the women's bathroom to take a piss. There is a black man in a yellow mini skirt squatting over the toilet, with a white turd coming out his ass. Lenny picks up a bag of peanuts with a picture of an ocean on them. He looks down at his slurpee and sees a black hole of eternity that scares him. Vince is staring at the popcorn popping around, leaving a buttery smell crawling up his nose. His heart stops beating from to much heroin. His body falls to the ground, his slurpee moves down the shiny floor, like hot lava running over a boring town.

Jimmy and Peter are both grabbing some cheap malt liquor forty ouncers from behind a sliding glass door. One of them has gold in his pocket. Jimmy gets a sharp pain in his stomach, like a little dwarf was in there, poking at his intestines with a corkscrew. His 40 O' falls to the ground, breaking into a million shards of crystals. They both hear a cat purring, and an ex-lover groaning.

Peter looks over at two young girls in the corner of the store (Tara and Leslie). The girls are eating candy shaped hearts and holding hands, each with a jump rope around their necks. One of them is holding a map to the solar system, and a pointing finger is popping out of her forehead. The other one is having trouble with her asthma inhaler.

Rod is pouring himself some coffee. His secretary comes up to him and throws boiling hot coffee into his face. She has a picnic basket in her hand, filled with rotten apples. Rod screams in pain, and falls to the ground. Kerrie has a penis growing out of her belly button, and the secretary and her begin to kiss.

The man from Iran stares out the window, completely unimpressed with his surroundings.

~ZonkZest~ hops into the-711. All the people come to life. He has his army fatigue on. There is a glowing warmth radiating around his tired eyeballs. His ears have florescent lights sparkling from them. They are waiting for an answer. He has something in his pocket. A feeling of Euphoria comes over the characters, encircling their being. The music stops.

~ZonkZest~ does what he has to do to make them all smile, like they use to back on Mars, when he was growing up as a young child. To make them all feel again. It’s raining outside and a huge fireball like mushroom cloud is forming around the city. Aldo is lapping up some of the spilled slurpee flavors. Kerrie's child is squirming around in her stomach, yelling out his name.

~ZonkZest~ has another leg growing out of his hunched over back. The rainbow is gone.

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