Pablo Cortisone And The Faeces Of Eight

Pablo Cortisone, clad in brown rags taped up with human skin and an aluminium foil Stetson, grit his teeth as he pulled at the horse. The sun setting resembled coloured sands in a bottle. He stood in the desert. He had walked one hundred kilometres from the Cigar Ash Desert, rumoured to have been created by his own tobacco droppings. Still, the saliva-drenched cigar clung to his teeth and was caught in a face, victim to the crudest skin graft. A zigzag scar still infested with stitches crossed his face from top right to the left bottom. The bottom half was greasy Mexican brown, filled with black sewerage pockmarks (ironically grafted from the corpse of a Tijuana grave robber), the upper albino English. He had lost a great deal of his face in misguided, drunken gun duels at the U.K. Corral. He was known for, more than once, staggering around with lower face viscera bleeding and hanging. He thought he might have been born on The Garbage Planet. Before other events in his life, he was brought up as a pony for the rich, crawling on his hands and knees to the delight of round-faced children in white pyjamas. That was over for him in the tang of a whisky sour, slid across the bar as men in white shirts played quaint tunes on a run down piano. The bar fights had him embedded in the window of a saloon. Gartered whores disliked his tendency to spoof on old blinds. He was beaten many times, a pariah.

He crawled into the desolate wilderness, biting the brains out of cactuses and making bitter milkshakes from them. The sun worshipped his parched lips. He danced with lizards. He went mad in the prophecy of the book of the dead, which he could not read and had never heard of. The sun made him grow a cold chrome antenna from his head that died and melted down the side of his face. He cultivated a ritual that would often bring the light of the dead from the ground. They were men that hated the bugger. These yobbish spirits were essential for herding the female animals into his fire for the purpose of consumption. He danced with the fire in his eyes and ate the tails of the girl lizards. Peyote throbbed in his bloodstream. He stomped around, the drug controlling him. Pablo Cortisone screamed at the evil ground. Without water for days, he had stumbled across an amusement park in the middle of the desert. The terra forming of Elwood had gone horribly wrong. Behind him, he bade farewell to the million dead as they returned to the ground, only to return at the event of his exhumation.

He spat peyote at the ground in ritual. The park was a decayed wreck; its theme was a lure for those who loved necrophilia. It was originally called ‘Corpse Loving Jamboree Land’ but the letters of the sign had been torn away (except for the last seven). The tourists who had once gathered here yearned for the excitement of love with the dead. Black tents full of animatronic, mummified bodies speckled the landscape. Their withered corpses were loaded with hydraulics that shoved their withered derrieres in the air, accepting the rigid penises of men and the tongues of women, all clad in monstrous Hawaiian shirts. As Pablo toured the desolate grounds, he looked up at the majestic spirals of white roller coaster rails with black, vacated carts hanging off them like discarded snakeskin. He fell back into the sand as he dreamed of the possibilities. He saw the dead hanging from nooses, legs akimbo. He briefly dropped his thin cigar from clenched teeth to experience the taste of ancient popcorn that held a caramelised maggot in its kernel. He visited the red tents and buried his face in a room full of red satin pillows, surrounded by severed hands (some of the fingers of which had been replaced by small black ribbed dildos). He drank from old water bottles and tasted the sun in his mouth for the first time. He danced with the Morbid Ladies, whose bodies hung from wires and undulated the flaps of their skin in the blue tent. Then he found the carousel with its animatronic steeds. Once upon a time they had brayed and galloped their hefty hooves on the floor, going nowhere, with vigour not seen in any other desert. Now, when Pablo turned on the generator, the horses twitched and grunted with displeasure. But he found the one he liked, closely guarded by the pink umbrella of the carousel. The horse’s brown suede skin had faded and peeled from its eyes, revealing rusting metal parts. The lower part of its leg suffered the same affliction. The left eye was a twisted result of cybertronic atrophy and its mane was a riddle of dreadlocks. Nevertheless, he pulled at the horse. It eventually fell to the ground. He removed its pink and white candy cane stake and, in doing so, noticed it had the simulated and exaggerated genitals of a woman. Pink veins riddled the labias and gave way to a cavern of flesh. Pablo kicked the inside of the horse’s thigh and opened a flap that revealed a red “autonomous” button. The horse came alive, mewled and sang an electronic version of ‘Advance Australia Fair’ with backup Casio.

Pablo cared deeply for the animatronic steed and spent several months fashioning a saddle made of prune skins for it. He named her Dance Forty in the tradition of giving perfectly good horses stupid names. He slept with her at night in the red tent, sometimes playing with the artificial pleasure between her legs.

One day, a group of naughty banditos galloped into the province. They had big ratty hats, belts of bullets across their chests and handlebar moustaches. They wished to take control of the land. They had real horses (some with wooden legs) and real gold teeth. As they approached the park, Pablo was sitting at the bar of one of the saloons made entirely of human hair. His aluminium Stetson was drawn over his eyes. It was made to keep the alien voices out of his head. As per usual, he was slugging down shots of Arabic whisky. The snorts and clumping outside brought him to wariness. He staggered out of the bar, bashing the saloon doors open. The slates shattered into splinters. The banditos awaited him outside with double barrel shotguns raised in the air. Middle-eastern drum and bass rattled in Pablo’s head as he reached for his gun. It was only then that he realised that he didn’t have one. His fingers flailed in the air at his right thigh. The banditos laughed at him with foreign scorn and spat tobacco on Pablo’s nice sand. Pablo reverted to Plan B. He jumped up and down, flapping his arms in the air and screamed: “Go away! Go away! I hate you! Piss off! Leave me alone!”

He started crying.

The banditos laughed at the sky and then aimed their guns at Pablo. As the barrels blasted, Pablo panicked and back flipped in slow motion behind a water trough. Rounds hit the trough, throwing splinters into the air and water through the ruptures. Tears slowly flew from Pablo’s face as he avoided the fire. His aluminium Stetson fell to the ground.

“Finally,” said the high-pitched alien voices in his head, “we’re able to communicate with you. You are so fucking ignorant! We had the secrets of the universe on a platter just for you. And what do you do? Make a hat. Make a stupid fucking hat! My Allah, you are a stupid fuck! Anyway, it’s too late for that now. Consider yourself lucky that many thousands and thousands of years ago, we had buried a bow and arrows in the sand where the trough now stands for the purpose of advancing the human race upon discovery. I guess you can use it now for your own purposes, you fucking hat-wearing ignoramus.”

Pablo quickly dug through the sand under the trough, avoiding the bad guy blasts. He found the bow and arrows. They were made of the most beautiful metal he had ever felt. It moulded to his hands as if made for them. He sprung up and flung arrows at the banditos in the most fluid and accurate way one could imagine. He was balanced on the trough when it disintegrated beneath him. The arrows flew with untold grace into the chests of the bad guys, promoting geysers of blood. Their laughter left them as death rattles. ‘Message to My Girl’ (Enzso version) peaked in his head as he fell into the water. A last buckshot from an orphaned shotgun caught Pablo in the head, blowing flesh from part of the top of his face. He writhed and crawled to the place where Dance Forty lay. She was in a yellow tent, lying on a mosaic of newspapers and draining herself of oil. Pablo rested his head on her chest and tapped the rib that held the scalpel. Blood distorted Pablo’s face. For the first time, Dance Forty seemed upset. Oil leaked from her good eye. She understood the task. Pablo slowly cut a portion of skin from her chest for the purpose of making a new graft. She whinnied in sympathy as the suede was taken from her and sewn into Pablo’s head. He had used the black hair of a long dead sideshow attraction for the stitches. He kissed the nostril of his horse, which had originally been rendered as an anus for unusual brown pleasure. She nuzzled him. She wished her brother were with him. He was capable of all sorts of interesting things. But it seemed that genetic generations separated them. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ echoed into the desert night.