Who is Jerry Holiday? Chapter 1

Remember when you were young? And you still had dreams. You thought it was possible they might come true. Maybe you wanted to marry a prince. Maybe you wanted to be a billionaire in a mansion with exotic pet elephants and doors that opened when they sensed your presence. Maybe you wanted world peace. Maybe you thought you could be anything. The world was an open book. A blank page. An empty canvas. And there you were the artist, ready to write and draw. There was a wide, beautiful expanse in front of you. Like the Great Plains of America before the Europeans butchered the natives, raped their women, and enslaved their children.

Reality hits fast and hard. You couldn’t be a ball player because you struck out in front of the whole class. Little Maddie Ray spit in your face when you finally found the courage to ask her out. Little Johnny Rascal ripped up the love letter you gave him. You got married and had kids and found it was nothing but hard work and heartbreak. You found your husband fucking your best friend on the pool table in the basement. You turned to alcohol and drugs when the world came crashing down on your head.

Maybe life is nothing but heartbreak and pain and suffering. Then maybe we’re the gods with our imaginations and dreams and ideas that are so much better than this harsh reality. Or maybe we’re the ones who destroyed this reality. Maybe the Christians are right and we’re all hopeless sinners mired in this world of pain and suffering and we need a God to save us. Or maybe the Jews are right and God has a chosen people and the reason things suck so bad for me is I’m not one of them. Or maybe the Muslims are right and we’re all failing miserably to live up to God’s golden standard and that’s why this world is such a shit hole. Or maybe the Hindus are right and we all keep getting reincarnated over and over in this world of filth until we finally figure our shit out. Or maybe the Buddhists are right and we need to find a way to transcend all of this somehow. Or maybe they’re all full of shit and we’re all fucked.

Maybe we’re all just breezes blowing through this world with no destination, no purpose, just meandering and wandering, building knowledge, gaining and losing friendships and loves, biding our time and filling our days until one day we die and it’s all over.

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This flew through metal rungs and out over moving bodies. Repetitive sounds vibrated all around as it flew into dark holes and flapping fabric. Darkness filled the space like closing walls as this flew. This shot through smoke, dispersing clouds of sweet stench, over reflections of white powder and over a crowded floor. Through an open door and out into the night, towards the tiny lights in the darkness above, past clouds and towards the largest round light with bumps and ridges and shadows, and down over water, from land to land and sea to sea and back again to do it all over every day and every night until stillness settled like a falling curtain.

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Billy had received an invite to the club from none other than Jerry Holiday. The man, the myth, the legend. He’d been hearing stories forever, and now here he was, tripping balls and rolling, candy flipping as the techno beats blasted and ravers danced like Fred Astaire on speed, feet busting moves, spinning on the floor as strobe lights flashed and televisions showed scenes from long forgotten Anime movies.

He walked over to a couch and sat down to find his bearings. Women with pigtails and pacifiers were putting ice in peoples’ mouths. Everyone suddenly looked like little kids. Billy heard a subtle slurping sound just underneath the dark beats and turned to see a beautiful woman with a cute, doe-eyed face giving a muscular black man a blowjob. Right there in the club in front of everyone.

The dancers continued dancing and Billy stood and joined them, taking his place on the floor inside a glowing yellow ring. He moved his feet as the beats thumped and closed his eyes and smiled. He looked up as the light on the ceiling opened up, revealing God. Billy felt the light coming down on him and realized there were strings of light reaching down to everyone on the dance floor and everyone outside and everyone in the world. They were all linked to God and each other in one endless neural network of feeling and euphoria of light.

He opened his eyes and all of the dancers suddenly looked like zombies, or was it lizards? Billy stood and started walking towards the exit. He sensed angels crying for his lost existence as he stepped out of the club to see a black-haired vixen wearing a tight red dress. He recognized her narrow face and made the connection that she was Maddy Starlight, a famous singer and DJ. His friend had told him that she’d be spinning there.

Maddy smiled a gorgeous, million dollar star smile with shiny white teeth. “Hey.”

Billy eyed her like a deer in headlights. Finally his mind caught up with his mouth, or was it vice versa? “Hey.” The world around them wavered and Billy suddenly had the overwhelming desire to touch someone.

“Wanna go for a walk?”

“With me?” Billy asked. He wasn’t sure if this was real or not but he decided he’d just go with it. Everything seemed to have a pink and purple day glow tint and everything was wavering. Billy wondered if he was actually looking at the atoms that pieced everything together.

“Yes, with you. Come on. Let’s go for a walk. This might just be your lucky night, sunshine sugarcane.” Billy wasn’t sure exactly if that was what she’d said but that’s the way his mind processed it.

Billy shrugged. “Okay then. Why not?”

They walked along dark blue alleys. Everything strangely smelled like piss. Billy had the sudden fear he’d pissed himself, but felt his pants and they were dry. He then distinctly felt something coming out of his cock, but he felt again and his pants were dry.

“Don’t start now,” she said. “I’m not ready yet.”

Billy had no idea what she was talking about.

“So what brought you to the club tonight?”

Billy glanced at her perfect, pale cheek. “Jerry Holiday. I got an invite from him.”

“In person?” Maddy asked.

Billy shook his head as they walked. “Email.”

“I should have known.” Maddy chuckled. “He’s a crazy one, that Jerry Holiday. Some of the stories about him…”

“I know,” Billy said. “I heard he knows celebrities in Los Angeles. Hobnobs with all those famous people you see on TV.” He chuckled. “But you probably do all that, too.”

“Tell me about it,” Maddy said. “But have you heard the crazy stories? I mean the real crazy ones?”

Billy looked into her shining green eyes and shook his head. “Like what?”

“Like that he went down to South America, bushwhacked his way to one of those villages where they’ve never seen another human, and smoked some rare plant that sent him to other dimensions and shit like that?”

Billy laughed. “Never heard that one.”

Maddy nodded as they walked. “How about the time he was attacked by five Russian gangsters and he talked one of them into killing the other four and then committing suicide?”

“That sounds ridiculous,” Billy said. He couldn’t believe he was walking with Maddy Starlight. He’d had a crush on her as long as he could remember. A crush from afar. From television and magazines. This was like a dream come true.

“Yeah,” Maddy agreed. “I guess. But after he’d killed his four friends, it wasn’t so hard for Jerry to talk him into killing himself. All that guilt and everything.”

“Where are we going?” Billy asked.

“My friend’s house,” Maddy said. “She was actually one of Jerry’s girlfriends for a while. Small world.”

“Yeah,” Billy said.

He followed her up some steps and through a wooden door with crystals that seemed to refract light like broken rainbow shards. They walked up rickety stairs past pictures of children with missing teeth and all their Elementary School smiles. He noticed one little girl in particular, a redhead with huge, purple-rimmed heart-shaped glasses.

They made it to a bedroom with an old fashioned bed with a canopy. The wooden posts holding up the canopy were carved into beautiful naked female bodies. Before long there was one such body sitting in front of Billy, eyeing him mischievously as she unbuttoned his pants. Just beyond her, Billy noticed a painting on the wall picturing a pirate with an eyepatch and a pipe. A scar on his right cheek was shaped like a star.

Billy couldn’t believe he was getting a blowjob from the crush of his life. He closed his eyes and looked at the kaleidoscopic shapes on his eyelids as he felt the wet ecstasy of her lips. He exploded inside again and again, his pants pushing out rainbows. And he finally came like an explosion of passion ecstatic fire warmth and thunder flashing lightning nuclear explosions of energy.

When he was done, he looked up at Maddy and saw that she wasn’t Maddy at all. She was a toothless middle aged woman who looked like she’d lived life a little too hard. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked.

“I think you must be tripping or something,” she said. “Hey, Coco. Slug ’im.”

A big, muscular fist smashed into Billy’s face.

When he came through, he was in the back seat of a car. His head was bleeding with sharp pain. He wailed as the car screeched to a halt. He felt a sharp pain in his stomach when he realized Coco was stabbing him. Billy flew out of the back of the car and slammed painfully into the street.

Billy lay in the street holding his bleeding stomach. He realized his wallet was gone, but that was the least of his worries. “Help me.” He reached up towards a woman walking by. She had a grey trench coat and one of those French beanies. It was red like the blood spilling from Billy’s stomach. “Help…”

The woman walked away with a disgusted look on her round face. Billy closed his eyes and thought to himself this was how he was going to die.