THE ULTIMATE BLEND

Don’t you just love Black Humour? This story is just a full pelt gross out for the sake of it. It has no literary value.

THE ULTIMATE BLEND

The Shape Changer in my story is quite real believe me. Huh! Believe me, he says. Believe what you like. There’s plenty of documentation if you care to look.
He was up at the window. Three stories up mind you….nothing exactly ordinary. For a start he wasn’t cleaning windows. Go on, ask me how I know? Well he wasn’t carrying a chamois, and no bucket of water. Oh, and he wasn’t standing on anything either if that’s anything to go on.
Know what he said to me, all smiling as if he wasn’t picking a fight? “You want your fucking head smashed in?” Like he was offering ice cream.
What it is with Shape Changers is that people go “Look” like you’re Loono Marx or whatever, “Look, it’s only a ceiling fan” or “look” like you’re some scared little nightmare kid, “look, it’s just a hairbrush”. Doesn’t matter that it had a big red tongue with chainsaw blades for teeth and steel spikes as sharp as needles just two seconds ago.
Well up till then I didn’t believe in Shape Changers either, not really, and I wasn’t having any kind of reasonable conversation with some weird urban mountaineer whatdoyoucallem rockcrawler threatening however nicely to smoosh my brains.
So I gave him a big fat push right in the face through the open window. Well, I thought that’s what I was doing, but then his face changed into a Whirling Blender and I was lucky to get out of it with three fingers on my right hand. It was just then that I realised that I was in deep shit, ‘cos this bad bastard was set onto me from Hell and he sure as shit wasn’t going home to Lucifer without one tortured-ass soul. So there.
There wasn’t any time to think like I do now. Why pick on me? You’re not thinking about why pick on me when you’ve just lost three fingers on your right hand, and that rabbit from the Disney movie, Thumper you know, is sitting there on your dressing table munching on one. Get this, he was singing “When you’re down to your last crunchy carrot…And the world seems lonely and blue… just go Thumpety thump thump thump, thumptety thump thump thump, and the world will smile with you. Making those little rabbity snickety noises like some cutesy bunny, chowing down on my right index dammit!
I had this big Galliano bottle filled with coloured sand. One of those cheap-shit ornaments you sort of inherit and never get rid of. I forget the name of the girl…oh that’s another story, but I’d come home from Hamilton Island with the Galliano bottle as a reminder of how it got emptied and then refilled with coloured sand. Anyway, it made a great makeshift baseball bat. You don’t know just how useful your fingers are for holding things until you try to whack a cute little bunny with a ten- pound glass bat. Shape Changers are quick at the best of times, but right at that moment I saw how to beat it eventually. Faced with real need you notice things, and what I noticed right there and then was that Shape Changers just for a split of a nanosecond when they change into something else, have to pass through their real self. And that’s the only way to kill them. You have to get them right at the time they’re their real self, otherwise there’s nothing you can do. I knew that as soon as I saw it. Remembered it from something I’d read a long time ago. You can ask him. Ask Stephen King. He wrote about some Shape Changers in one of his books. You can ask him. Go to www.stephenking.com. Ask him, he’ll tell you. He’ll back me up on this one. Hah! Well right then I was too slow. The Galliano bottle slipped through my bloody fingers and missed by a mile, but in the flash it took to turn from Thumper into Dopey from Elm Street, I saw the Shape Changers real shape. His real self. No chance to think too much about it though. Dopey had left his own hands in the land of Snow White and this was one real unfriendly dwarf. Dopey Scissorhands. He had this mouth full of Blue Gillettes, or Wilkinson Swords, I never did know the difference, and before there was chance to skitter out of the way he had my right big toe off at the first joint with those snickety clickety scissors, and the blade teeth had chopped, sliced and diced it to the bone. He stood there sucking on the bone like it was a none tipped cancer stick. “This is so fun!” He was saying.
Have you ever been scared?
Yes, in pain too. In five minutes I’d just lost three fingers and a toe, and it hurt like hell. But you don’t notice it much when you’re scared. I know these things.

Down three flights of stairs, out through the security door and left for half a block there’s a shop that sells Voodoo, Hoodoo, Juju, that sort of stuff. And Desiree the statuesque Haitian who looks like a super-tall super-gorgeous bald headed Sinead O’Conner and thinks she’s Satan’s gift to sinners is the woman who runs the place, and she doesn’t like me. Ok, I’m a sleaze-bag and she’s got good reason, but hey tough titty, It takes all kinds. It’s no reason to call up these other worlders just for the sake of a bit….well, you just guess. But she for sure put the curse on, and she for sure could take it off if I could get to her damned shop. The problem here, being that the door to my apartment wasn’t where it was supposed to be. That’s Shape Changers for you. They can do that. What used to be the door was just a space. And in the space was a big exhaust fan like in a massive air conditioning unit, and the fan was just starting to flop around nicely so’s I could feel the air in the room being vented through that hole. Probably into another dimension… or Hell, or wherever those shitting things come from.
First thing it sucked in was the letter I was writing to my mom. Six months I hadn’t written, and then just when I’d figured out how to ask her to lend me the money….glop! It gets sluiced into the nether regions of Hell. You can’t know how hard it was to be nice to that old bitch. Back to the sodding drawing board!
The only other way out of the rathole that misrepresents itself as a luxury one bedroomed apartment, city centre, close to all amenities, was the window where the trouble started in the first place. I’m portly…alright, fat. I’m fat, so what! Even if I was Jack Be Nimble I wouldn’t want to leap out and fall three stories onto that idiotic trellis festooned with Bougainvillea. I’ll tell you about Bougainvillea…fall on that shit and you’ll get more pricks in ten seconds than an old whore had in her life! Kid you not!. The Shape Changer was just getting into his stride too. Stuff starting to fly everywhere. Paper, a few pens and pencils, paper clips. I work from home. I’m a writer. A fat, lazy sonofabitch socially alienated writer who sits at a computer screen for nine hours every day churning out dross for shit-pulp fantasy magazines and ezines and spends the rest of the time I’m not sleeping talking dirty on the internet. So arrest me.
Pretty soon the bigger stuff started to move. A paperweight I got from Colorado started juddering about. Inside was a snowstorm and a little airplane swilling around about to crash into a lake. My favourite John Denver souvenir. Now, that thing was heaps heavy so you can imagine how much suction that mothersucking Shape Changer was generating by now. I can tell you for sure that if it survived the trip, old Lucifer has at least one 1.4gig Athlon DDR computer at his disposal, along with a pretty decent solid oak desk and 850watt speakers. Not to mention the John Denver paperweight. What’s he want to do? Write his autobiography? Well that JuJu cow did warn she’d make sure I never worked again in this or any other town. So I thought she’d ring a few people, put the word out, you know? Better than that. Eight unpublished novels, four hundred and fifteen short stories, and the zillion bits of filth for the internet PrOn sites that paid the rent on the apartment and kept satin sheets on the bed and some paid-for honey in it every night. Shit-in-a-biscuit! That was my LIFE flying off into jujuland!
Well that was it! I was sure as shit going to do something not real friendly to that gal soon as I could find a way to stick something up the Shape Changers asshole and jiggle it about!
“I know who you are!” I shouted inanely. When you’re powerless to do anything else except hang on to a doorjamb to stop being sucked into Hades you really do scream inane things. I know, believe me. “I’ll hound you all the way back to DisneyWorld I swear!” I screamed.
The damnedest thing happened. The Gateway to Hell disappeared, and silence hung over the desolation like it might have done over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he was standing there, looking all innocent twittering his fingers all over his black hair. “Really?” He said, sweet as peach pie and ice cream with hokey pokey. “That would be so decent of you. I do like it there, with so many children to play with.”
Two more seconds and I’d have been feeling sorry for the little pisser. Shape Changer psychology, you get me? The creepy dung-muncher needed sixty seconds to catch his breath and recharge for another onslaught. Straight up! Steven King will back me up on that one too. That’s when you can get ’em… right in that window of opportunity. Thank Christ for Kingy! I reckon he saved my fat carcass with that bit of wisdom. When I get the first chance I’m going to log on and tell him, so’s he knows… He’s the best!
Look it’s not unusual for a short fat bald guy living in New York to carry a weapon. Short fat bald guys living in New York need a weapon. You’re not going to manage real well on a sense of humor to carry you through. Not in this town. Ask Woody Allen what it’s like trying to make a New Yorker laugh. He’ll tell you “Move to California”. Yeah. And you’ll need a good solid S&W .38 if you get to meet a Shape Changer one sunny breakfast time. Well, however many times that face had been altered in the past, this time it was permanently and irrevocably altered. Smooshed brains galore all over the back wall. “Change that scumsucker!” I was giggling like a big teenage girl. Relief I guess. Crass, I know, but I lifted the hot little barrel to my lips and blew down it. Hooo! That felt good! I wonder if all survivors get that big adrenaline kick…you know, makes you want to do it all again just for the buzz.
Now for the JuJu bitch! Yes! I was on a roll. No point in stopping now, just go for it. Stick that snubby hot little barrel up the witches nose and unbutton my belt with the left hand. Yes! I was feeling hot just thinking about it! No JuJu spells required. No need to call on the supernatural. I could prick my Haitian doll all on my ownsome thank you ma’am. No wukking forries as the man said. I was out of that apartment faster than John Belushi doing flick flacks in a gospel church . Don’t tell me you didn’t see that movie. It was quite a surprise getting down to the street. For a start it was after 10pm, and raining like it only does in two cities on earth. The other one is London. Pissy, cold rain that tastes of traffic fumes and dirt, and rots your clothes in no time flat. There was no one on the street except a dirty old lush sucking on a bottle wrapped in brown paper. Too far gone to panhandle me, and that probably saved his life. I could have blown his lights out and done him a favour, no trouble at all. Public service and glad to be doing it. Yes!
And then there she was, Desiree my desired. What sweet coincidence! What divine luck. All locked up and ready for home, waiting for a cab. And not a cab in sight. Yes! “I’ve had so much fun today”. I said, coming up beside her. “The day’s just flown by.” She looked at me sort of puzzled, and confused, and then her lip curled into a sneer. Erotic, I thought. “Get lost creep!” She had that kind of dark brown sexy voice, like whisky and cigarettes, and long nights out in dim smoky clubs. I wanted to let her know how I’d slammed the Shape Changer, and foiled her little plot. Of course I knew that wouldn’t be possible. I would take her up to my little love nest for an exploration of her little love-nest, and there’d be no mess, no fuss, and no Michael Jackson with his work-in-progress face finally eradicated by messrs Smith and Wesson. Oh no! The devil looks after his own, so he does. All those little gargoyles and imps cleaning and polishing like Mr Sheen while I’m down there doing the old silver-tongue on the JuJu bitch. For sure I’d open the door and all would be as it was. No Shape Changer. No traces. All my valuable works of fact and fiction neatly stored in cardboard boxes right back where they came from. And the gleaming new Peripherals Plus with 20″ LCD monitor and 512Mb DDR ram, blinking away on the Britney Spears Screensaver. Everything as it was. That’s what you get when you get lucky and exit a Shape Changer…your life back. Hey Stevie! Yo My Man! He’s the King! Yes!
“No need to take the curse off now girl” I said. “Done it myself. With this.” Gee Willikers! You should just have seen her eyes when she saw that snub nose. “Jesus!” She gasped, rolling her eyes all around so’s I could see the whites. Wide open and whoa ho!! Scared! “Whachew got dere you bad Mother huh?” Not much Haitian JuJu girl in that tone of voice! The statuesque six foot two very lovely Desiree Queen of My Heart sounded pretty much African American to me right then. It just shows, we all play our part. We’re all Shape Changers of a sort. ‘Scuse the philosophy.
I promised not to kill her. Just to plunk her in a wheelchair for the rest of her miserable life. Jeffrey Deaver had a guy do that in one of his books. Poked a little chrome snub-nosed .32 right in the small of this guys back and shattered the spinal chord. Young guy, very athletic. Played basketball, and football. “Then I can come take you for walks…and things”. Whoo! What a thought! The perfect relationship. “Can I be your best friend oh sweet Desire?” I couldn’t help it. I was talking like one of those crazy guys in psycho movies. All oily clichés. Didn’t sound right coming out of the mouth of a short fat guy. She said “Whatchew want? You just a dumb crazy guy!”
So I told her what I wanted, and when…right now… and where…. right between my black satin sheets. Know what she said? Huh? She said “Dat’s agin de law you dumb ass fool!” You really gotta laugh, even given the end result.
You know, I guessed right. The gargoyles and coal-black imps had performed mightily. Not a paperclip out of place. The John Denver souvenir back holding down a stack of paper on the polished desktop. The Peripherals Plus bouncing Britney Spears young mammaries around the 20″ Acer deluxe screen. The little darlings had even made up the bed. Desiree had some kind of composure back. It was like, I had the gun, but it felt like she was in control. Weird. Sort of off-centre, but exciting. She was cool, and I was very shortly going to rape Ms cool, and do anything I wanted to her, no exceptions, and why?…because I could. Because I had the gun, and I was horny. And I had three less fingers and one less toe to thank her for. And anything I took from her, be it pride, self respect, faith in human nature…yes all that and more…. I wanted it. You don’t go setting Shape Changers onto folks! No way José! “You got any of that stuff?” I asked. No point in beating around the houses, and hiding under the bushes or whatever. Desiree knew exactly what I meant by that. She made potions for crying out loud. Like, things for folks to have power over folks. Love Potion Number 9. “I got some weed”. She said. I swear I saw some strange kind of look in her eye. And maybe she smiled or something. Hard to tell. ” But it ain’t no ordinary weed you hear? ” “So you sit right down here honey and roll us a little number huh?” I patted my knee. “And you remember girl,” I said, “kindness, decency, compassion, all that kind of shit is not an integral part of my complex nature”. I like all that mealy-mouthed condescending verbiage. It makes the real threat sound so much more threatening I think. “So believe me girl, if you don’t behave I will hurt you so bad!” Then I grinned my menacing grin. “Come to think of it, even if you do behave I might just hurt you. But maybe not so bad. Know what Desireé did? Damn bitch smiled! This time not a maybe-smile, but a full-on dancing-eyed open-lipped whiter-than-white sunshine-of-your-life smile. Then a snaky, suggestive pink tongue flicked around and over them pearly whites. Oh YES! Pure white, soft pink, and flawless black. That mouth, that face, just made to be of service to man! Oh YES! Know what I thought then? I thought ‘This girl likes living on the edge! She really and truly likes doing this shit!’ Well that thought got old Danny Glover stirring in the writer’s jocks! Danny Glover? Don’t ask! Just an old girlfriend joke. She’d really meant Danny De Vito. You’ve got to laugh. Desireé dipped into her shoulder bag, and I tapped the little chrome plated snub nose on my ashtray to call her attention. “No tricks hun!” I warned. When your hand comes out of that bag I only want to see the shit in it OK?” The clichés were tripping over themselves this night. Just like in the movies. Or a James Patterson novel.
The ‘weed’ was jet-black, compressed into a hard little pellet, and you could smell the aroma across the room. Probably some form of Skunk weed from the Netherlands. “They been calling it The Ultimate Blend” She said. “You sure you wanna smoke this gear?” “Oh but you have to join me.” I said right back. “Sit on my knee and say hello to Danny Glover.” “OK”. She said with a tiny shrug of resignation. “You’re the man with the .32. And I guess I’d rather get drilled by Danny Glover.” Desireé placed the needle thin spliff between those luscious lips, and set fire to the end with my gold Dunhill. She took a deep drag. Her shoulders went back, and the black silk blouse stretched and strained. Gee Willikers! I wanted to get my hands on that miraculous pair! And she walked towards me like she was in charge of the whole danged-up bedeviled evening.
In a few minutes her eyes were alight like fire! Her beautiful, unparalleled face begging, needing. Oh Yes! YES! Thank you Lord! Thank you Jesus! And I thought well man, if that’s what the Ultimate Blend can do… count me right in there with bells on!
Well, you can take this as gospel. I’ve done some heavy dope in my time. MDMA, Coke, Horse, you just start at A and I’ll take you all the way through to Z. I’m not immoral, let’s get that straight. I’m amoral. Immoral’s a different thing altogether! This stuff though…whooeee! Undoubtedly the ULTIMATE BLEND! Absofrickinglutely! Yes Sir!
Hey look! I might have intended to rape and humiliate the bitch. Sure I intended to give her a dose of the rough stuff. Sure I did. But I didn’t. It wasn’t turning out like that at all. What she was doing….what she did, she did because man that’s what the bitch wanted to do. Sure, yes, of course, we did lots of stuff. Like in a dream. An hallucination. Hey! You notice that? AN hallucination. Not a hallucination. Like AN hotel. Not A! Know what really tees me off and sticks in my craw? Alternate. Like in an alternate route. Jesus wept! It’s alternative for Christ’s sake! Alternative! I don’t live an alternate lifestyle. (Ok I might, but you know, I’m lots of things but not schizo!) I live an alternative lifestyle.
Wait a minute. Allow me just a minute of procrastination. I’m getting to the point as fast as I can. Look how much King Stephen procrastinated in that humungous novel IT. If he can, I can. Well, we were stoned. Stoned! I mean S.T.O.N.E.D when she decided, to get on down and give old Danny Glover the kiss of life. Ohh! YES! It was like feathers at first. It tickled, and then it was just warm and hot and mmm!! MMMMMMMM! You can dig that. We’re all grown up ’round here. She was nipping, and nuzzling, and getting right on in there, and I was holding down on that bald and beautiful dome. The nips and nuzzles were a bit sharp, and then soft, and then sharp again. She bit and sucked, and the feeling got just that much more intense as the dope laid that fog across the erotic synapses. I had to ask her to stop, but she didn’t. I said “Hey cool it doll!” Then I was pleading. Then screaming, “get off me bitch or I’ll blow a hole right through you!” Oh Shit man the agony! I tried to pull her head back up, but there was no hair to pull. I grabbed her ears, but she had those little shell-likes you can’t get any grip on you know! Then I was screaming! Screaming and screaming and screaming, and I couldn’t shoot the bitch because the pain was so bad I couldn’t pull the trigger. And there was a buzzing in my head, loud and heavy like a chainsaw! And there was red everywhere, exploding in my head. I guess I must have passed out, because the medics were there. No Desireé though. Man she’s a clever bitch. They found the dope all right. And they found the blender on my knee with Danny Glover all smooshed around inside. She’s the Shape Changer, I tell you! That’s not just any old blender! Why won’t anyone believe me! Just ask Stephen King. He’ll tell you!
THE END