Smoking Fireflies (True Freak pt 2)

Smoking Fireflies



The rubber soles of my shoes had all but burned apart after skidding the heels against tattered backwater road at the bottom of the hill. There were no brakes, no streetlights, no helmets or reflecting mirrors. Just pure darkness with cool autumn wind as fireflies flickered off in some distant field of dead corn stalks. All while three, undesirable misfits howled manically at the moonlit sky for no damn good reason whatsoever. My head felt fuzzy, like I were tranced in some constant state of bliss that knew no bounds of anything resembling mercy. My blood was still warm from four tall shots of hard Irish whisky, and just beyond the rim of blackened tree lines you could see at least half a dozen town buildings shining all the way from the rotten core of Ossining; one of upstate New York’s most infamous little holes in the ground.

I knew when I had reached the hill’s end because I saw a faint fiery glow from two
Bic lighters as Jesse and Isaac lit up a couple of cheap, unfiltered Pall Mall’s while blowing smoke out alongside the ditches. They then passed one over to me, as Mikey came flying down on his Schwinn Mark IV Jaguar to have a few puffs before the sticks had burned down to their buds. It wasn’t much, but it was all we were able to steal from that shitty little convenient store without rattling cause for alarm, who we have Mikey to thank for, or as we liked to tease him as, Ebony, cuz of his slicked back, darker than black greaser haircut. He was the shortest one among us with the hottest temper, and we all busted his balls for it, but I gotta say, that cut did go hand-in-hand with that kickass leather jacket he took from his oldman. Said I could have it one day if I ever beat him in poker, but everyone knows that little fuck’s bluffs are hard to call.

We started the evening off right, with an exchange of friendly fists against a couple of Ebony’s rival punk gangs to get the veins pumping with a rush of adrenaline. After a couple of bruises here and there, and a bloody nose to boot, we took the road head on, riding off to our next target who had a special knack for extracurricular activities with the kids that keep going missing in this dead-end town. It took us a while to figure out what was happening, but now that we finally have our man, we were gonna make him pay just like the others. Yeah, just like the others.

I remember hearing Ebony saying,

“If Hell is where all the sinners go, then shouldn’t it be like one big party?” only to be answered by a mumbling, buzzed Isaac,
“We’ll know when we get there”

A reasonable response, though we weren’t your traditionally defined psychopaths. We did have some standards, after all, even if our moral compass was a fucking roulette wheel. Not that anyone would ever be able to understand our creed anyway.

Truth be told, these three jerkoffs were the closest thing to family I ever had. We made a habit out of stupid escapades to fill in the void of our highlight days because it was all we ever needed, while occasionally setting things right in the world by doing what most lambs didn’t have the balls to do. Then again, it wasn’t always bottles of scotch and sunshine either. I met these assclowns by the most fucked up of circumstances, but it was an event that continues to shape us even still. Wind the clock back about year or so, and you’ll find me all alone, pissing my pants scared and being dragged to what I could only assume was my death.



I probably remember it better than any of these guys, but then, we always tried to block that part of our lives out of memory’s reach. It was a cold, mid-day in early December of 1962 when I had gotten kicked out of that miserable little shelter for beating up one of the bullies for the seventh time. My motto was simple and always just ‘The weak die and the strong survive’. A mentality that I still carry strong today. I had no real friends, at least no one on my level to talk to anyway, and not a single soul to relate with in any shape or form. Though my hands were always hidden in pockets, my fists were clenched at all times and ready to throw down at the first sign of trouble. This became a daily ritual for me, with every lunch break usually ending up with my nails digging so far deep into my skin that I had to wash blood off of my jeans from time to time.

But after those cold-hearted bitch nuns threw me out, and on my fifteenth birthday no less, I ended up wandering off so far in the middle-of-where that I stupidly accepted a hitch with some stranger in a Buick who claimed to be “just passing by”, only to get myself stuck with a syringe in my neck from an asshole hiding in the backseat, knocking me out cold. I later found myself half-naked and locked in a dog kennel next to another would-be victim that had been abducted days earlier. That same kid ended up being the treehugger we all know now as Jesse. He wasn’t that much older than me, but he didn’t seem as afraid, and he didn’t think twice about talking shit to those two pissant kidnappers. Even after beating and torturing us for hours on end, Jesse still put up a fight, where as I just lost all hope of ever being saved. It was the closest to Hell that I had ever been, all while the last of my already crippled faith had been burned out completely in a hail of cinders like a cigarette smudged against the surface of an ashtray.

Despite his own skinny stature in comparison, I guess I kinda admired that kind of courage. I had only known him briefly, but it felt like ages in those cages alongside one another. I think it was his strange personality that attracted me the most because I had never met anything like it before. I learned a lot about him during our time as prisoners together. He was a hairy, crude, and quite possibly sexually questionable guy, who I found out had a serious case of allergies to the point where even touching anything with dairy would give him rashes all over, and then a slow death. Though it didn’t seem to bother him none, since he always joked about going out in a blaze of glory by taking a bite of pizza. It never even crossed his mind that we could actually die in that hellhole.

Jesse was a runaway, hitchhiking his way through three states before finally being abducted by these two dickweeds. Before, everything about his life was pretty ordinary. To any other joe-shmo, it would have been a paradise made flesh; mom and pop were always wining and dining at fancy country clubs, leaving him to look after their prized materialistic abode and would get a beating from hell if there was so much as a scratch on the big screen TV or a spec of dust on the good china. Other than that, he had every new toy a boy could ever want, the latest stockpile in fashion trends, his own case of special non-dairy treats, and absolutely no one to share them with.

After years of the same old song and dance though, it was no mystery when he began to feel the cracks slowly chipping away at the back of his mind, constantly fracturing his disillusioned home sweet home until the only pleasure he could relive through his empty pulse was burglarizing his own backyard, sampling every drug known to man , and a perverse self-indulgence to help quell the thirst for his hopeless romantics that usually ended up with either dry humping a musty pillow or pitiful one night stands with the lost loves of his bitter thoughts made real off of the beat up mattresses of shady hotels.



Then, one day, it all came crashing down, and Jesse suddenly found myself on the road, either running for miles on end until the tips of his worn out shoes began to coat in dried blood, or when the next truck driver who happened to be driving out of state would give him a lift in exchange for a couple of freebies. Anything, so long as he was far away from that hell. I guess I could relate in some way…

Then, it finally happened. One day after the two sickos, who we came to call tweedledee and tweedledum because we never took the time to learn their stupid names, left the house for a couple of hours, Jesse and I managed to conjure up some make-shift keys to the locks on our pens out of some old bones from previous victims. We had never seen the outside of a window before in this place, but at the very least, it had to have been a two-story house in the middle of god knows where. When Jesse finally managed pick open his cage, he immediately went over to mine and let me out, though I didn’t have near the strength to move my own, my legs felt like puddy. After a grueling fifteen minutes of carrying me up a flight of stairs and walking through floor after floor of garbage and bloody ripped clothes, we made our way to an iron barred window facing the front of the house. I was right, it was practically in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Lucky us.

The doors were locked tight, obviously, and I was still way too weakened to help Jesse kick it down. But wouldn’t you fucking know it? The first person we see pedaling on by down the road was that greaser-wannabe punk, Ebony, on his tricked out Mark IV. After shouting at the top of our lungs for about thirty seconds, we finally got his attention over to us. He said the nearest town was quite a ways away, and that it would be better if we just tried to kick the door down together. Though after a few hard tries of throwing the weight of our crippled bodies against the door, the damn thing wouldn’t even budge, and to top it off, tweedledee and tweedledum were making their way closer to the driveway from down the road. Ebony went off to hide in a bush, saying that we might be able to get the jump on them and let ourselves out by force so long as we had the element of surprise on our side, so Jesse and I both hid in a closet in the living room with a hammer and baseball bat in hand.

They were lugging in the unconscious body of another kid about our age, who would later turn out to be that doofus oaf, Isaac. Though he was a bit on the heavy side for them to handle, cuz they ended up dropping his fatass on his head on the way in, causing him to wake up in a tantrum. Just as they were about to gag his mouth shut, Ebony came lunging in from behind with a rock in his hand, bashing it against the back of tweedledum, and leaving the other jackass completely unsuspecting of us running out from the other side and taking out his knees with the sheer blunt force of our weapons.

It may come as a surprise, but after we finally knocked them out cold and got Isaac back on his feet, escaping with our tails between our legs wasn’t the first thought to go through our minds. We searched the entire house until we realized that we were the only survivors, and after making acquaintances with one another, we also realized we had a lot more in common aside from just being victims. First thing was first though, we had decided to make amends with the two pieces of shit that had tortured us for the last twenty-six days straight. I kept track of passing days the best I could at first by scratching tally marks on my left arm. Figured my body was already scarred to shit anyway to put a dent in its ‘beauty’, so what was a few more cuts?



That was, until I dug up a musty little black book off of an old corpse that was half rotted in one of the “playrooms”, and using my blood as the ink. It wasn’t long after, that tweedledee and tweedledum found themselves awakened and wrapped in the same chains that they had hung us up with every time they whipped or beat us. We took our time with them at first, and after finally slitting the throat of tweedledum, tweedledee’s gag came undone, giving him the chance to say his last few words before we inevitably snapped his neck,

“You know what Hell and madness have in common, kids? Repetition!” then, it was all over.

Just before we set the house ablaze, we made a pact that very day. A true freak’s iron creed where we vowed in the blood of this little black book to hunt down scumbags like them and do the world a solid courtesy by putting them out of their fucking misery. Like I said before, we had a lot more in common than being just victims. Ebony pretty much lived on his own, with the exception of his alcoholic bastard of a father who was never awake to care about his existence. Isaac’s parents both died in a car accident against a drunk driver a year prior, and he’s been surviving off of the inheritance ever since, though he would throw it all away in a heartbeat if it meant having them back again for only a few short moments. And then there’s me, your’s truly, who’s been an orphan from birth. An unwanted bastard child, or as the nuns called us, the “needless”.

“This wind feels fucking great on my face!” Isaac suddenly shouted as we continued our way into the shady alleyways of some decrepit street in the center of town reeking of piss and rusted chrome.

My buzz was starting to fade as my mind soon gave way to the unbearable weight of being sober, though I still had plenty of iron left in my veins to keep me alive and bat-shit crazy.

“So like I was saying before, even IF by chance, there does happen to exist some kind of entity that has influence over this seemingly endless and mind-boggling universe, do you honestly believe that an entity like THAT gives two shakes of a lamb's tail of whether or not some chick gets an abortion or if some dude smokes pole? No! I know I don't give a damn, and I'm not a god. I'm just an insignificant speck of stardust like you and everyone else, dude. Compared to the universe, we are NOTHING. We're not gods, man. So people should really just keep their selective judgments and good-guy badges in their pants, you know what I mean?” Jesse was blurting out to Ebony, as he just senselessly nodded and smiled in obvious confusion to one of Jesse’s infamous rants.

We eventually made it to our destination; a butcher shop at the other end of town whose owner stays up later than most places in a secret back room behind the kitchen where his choice ‘meat of the day’ comes from those missing kids. Ebony was the one who put the pieces together after stumbling upon a ripped bag full of children’s undergarments in a dumpster next to the shop covered in dried blood. It was late, and the dusk would soon be upon us, so we acted fast, sneaking in through the backdoor til we found it’s douchebag master chef, Albert Fish. Given the stains we found on those undergarments, Mr. Fish did a lot more with his victims than just slaughter them like cattle, so we made absolute sure to make his sendoff into Hell a memorable one.

It started out with a quick hack and slash from behind the ankles with his own god forsaken meat cleaver stolen by Ebony, followed by a pummeling of bony fists and pointed shoes by all four of us combined. He was an elderly man, so there wasn’t much resistance, and though we’re not ones to usually pick fights with senior citizens, we made an exception for him. Halfway through, I went outside for a quick smoke break while the others finished up business,



“Hey, Alex! We’re almost about done in here, but I was thinking, we should all have like our own codenames, kinda like how Mikey is Ebony, you know what I mean?” Jesse said to me as he came bursting out through the backdoor like a fucking spaz.

“Yeah, I guess so. What did you have in mind?” I replied.
“Well, Isaac was thinking of something along lines of Lizard or Salamander or something stupid like that. But I was thinking I really like the name, Supertramp! What about you? You should have a name too!”

I looked at him in bewilderment, but went along with humoring him for the sake of courtesy. “I don’t know yet. I guess I’ll think of something”

After the deed was done, Isaac and Ebony came out together drenched in red and in a burst of laughter that was most familiar, yet comforting all the same. Looking back at it now, it’s like I’ve been circling in a constant frenzy of morbid thoughts that have only just started to break through into the light of my new bonds. Not long ago, you’d have a better chance of getting flipped off than being given a penny for your troubles. I suppose not much has really changed, at least not to any serious extent. But this experience gave birth to an opportunity, a chance to control our own destiny with the commandments of our creed as I skimmed through that little black book with pride at what we had created.

We etched this eternal refrain for humanity beyond these lines of paradox and juxtapose with our blood as the ink, translating those infernal screams into poetry that spoke aloud the universal outpouring of our souls. It’s not just another book on the shelf to collect dust, nor some half-ass attempt at a legacy, it is the very core of our being! The very proof that we were ever alive to begin with. We may walk a dangerous path, but we’re not bad guys...we’re just not good people. No matter what happens though, we will still remain the true freaks that we are who wouldn’t hesitate to leave everything behind at the drop of a dime if it meant hitting the open road and taking off into the rising sun in a blaze of bloody glory. And as we lit up those cheap cigarettes, we knew one thing for certain...we were brothers.




End of pt 2

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