Turns out, though, they made enough money off this gig to buy themselves an enormous Winnebago, which would theoretically get them the hell out of Chicago. Apparently, somehow the fuzz got wind of Laurel's grand pizza scheme. It seems a local alderman's daughter had taken just a bit too much of Laurel's Canadian bacon pizza, and had developed a bad case of intestinal cramping - and now, Laurel and Crank Boy were on the run. Laurel had my address in Seattle, and decided the time was ripe to pay me a visit. They gassed up the Winnebago, grabbed several dozen sheets from the pizza joint, published a letter to the editor in the Chicago Sun-Times denouncing the alderman as a commie, a pinko, and a red sympathizer, laughed merrily as the alderman's career was ruined, his house fire-bombed by local branches of the Committee to Weed Out Commie Red Pinkos Where They Live and Fire-Bomb Their Houses, and his family taken out to a small field just outside of town and viciously maimed by freedom-loving members of the Chicago mafia, and then they fired up that Winnebago and pulled out of town, stopping at several truck stops along the way to make sure they had a complete collection of Merle Haggard cassettes for the road, and enough beef jerky to clog a rhino's heart at twenty paces.
The newspapers and television stations were all abuzz the day after I burned the Space Needle to the ground and flew off into the night. There were pictures of me plastered across the front page, but no one got close enough to make out my face, luckily enough, what with all the flames and the smoke in the air that night. The headlines read "Mystery Maniac Destroys Space Needle, Doesn't Pay Bar Tab" and "Human Capable Of Flight Discovered - Boeing Stock Drops" and "Microsoft Buys Spokane - Flying Human Not Invited To Party" and so on.
It was while watching the news all day, having skipped out on my temp job (I had been temping for a real estate place downtown, where part of my job was making sure the eviction notices for low-income housing were properly typed and formatted and prepared with just that extra touch of TLC), that Laurel and Crank Boy pulled up in front of the house. Even before they got out of the Winnebago, I knew it was them, probably because somewhere along the way Crank Boy had scrawled the words "Crank Boy and Laurel World Tour" in goat blood across the side in big sticky letters. They bounded up the steps to the house, Laurel wearing her usual blue jeans and black top, Crank Boy wearing his usual San Diego Chicken suit draped with pigskins and smeared with cottage cheese. I realized they were very likely "tripping out," as the kids say. "Here," Laurel said by way of saying hello, "eat this."
Well, of course I was happy to see these two again. I took the peanut butter & sheet of acid sandwich she offered and began to munch.
"Don't you think that's a little excessive?" Crank Boy asked, his gravelly, chain smoker's voice unchanged since Chicago. "Wipe off some of that peanut butter, for fuck's sake."
"Right," I said, letting big heaping globs of acid-soaked peanut butter fall to the floor, so that the ants and the roaches in the place could get as whacked as I was about to be.
We were to trip incredibly hard together over the next several weeks.
I must say that there was a certain recklessness to our approach. No careful measuring of intention, no deliberate exploration of meaning and reality, these precautions were not for us. No, in those heady, sickening days, we sucked down LSD at a rate which would have alarmed us had we been capable of composing a lucid thought. You might suspect that there was some element of "escapism" involved with our activities, but in fact the absurd realm into which we "escaped" was no more appealing or attractive than the bullshit reality from which we had come.
And throughout the weeks of relentlessly boosting the same awful experience into newer and weirder realms, I could not shake the image of that spandex suit, hanging in my closet. Taunting me. Tormenting me. Whispering sweet nothings in my brain. Of course, I hadn't had it analyzed in a lab yet, so I couldn't prove it was spandex, but it sure as hell felt like what I'd always imagined spandex would feel like. The suit wanted me, and there was no Bill Culp character in my life to make sure I used the suit for good instead of evil. What was to stop me from taking over the planet, what with the awesome superpowers at my disposal?
At some point during those weeks, we were sitting in a circle watching our limbs come off and reattaching them in a seemingly arbitrary order. Crank Boy had just grown four extra heads, and one of them said, "Scotto, you seem preoccupied. I think it's time for sharing."
But there was no way I could share the awful truth. I would never admit that I actually owned a piece of spandex. Shit, word got out of that and next thing you know, people'd think I was a member of Poison.
Meanwhile, in Auburn, Seattle's lamest suburb, the television set in the recreation room of the Auburn Insane Asylum and Hair Styling Salon had been tuned to the gripping saga of the Space Needle's destruction all throughout the crisis. Someone over there was watching the events unfold, dreaming jealous dreams of mayhem and destruction, plotting nefarious plots and vicious schemes.
"Time for your meds," the attendant said, and Dr. Ugly smiled. Little did the attendant know that for the past eight years, Dr. Ugly had slowly been chewing and eating the inside of the fiberglass mask that kept his hideous visage obscured from view. And now, today, as the attendant slipped the little red pills (the ones marked "BIG FUN! - 20 MG") through the mouth slot, Dr. Ugly's incredible slithery tongue wrapped itself around those poor, hapless fingers.
"Hey!" the attendant shouted. "Hey, them's my fingers!"
With a sickening chomp, said fingers no longer belonged to the attendant.
"AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" screamed the attendant. A vicious head butt from the fiberglass mask dropped the eight-fingered attendant to the floor. Moments later, Dr. Ugly had the attendant's keys in his mouth, and a horrific escape was in progress.
"WAAAAAAAA!" screamed the attendant.
Ah yes, thought Dr. Ugly. My inhuman ability to Be Hideous is returning. The mask itself, suddenly terrified of the face it was covering, leapt away from Dr. Ugly's horribly deformed face. Doors did not need to be forcibly opened, for they opened themselves, out of sheer disgust. He met no resistance on his way out, for the very hallways themselves twisted and distorted themselves in an attempt to escape his oncoming presence. He reached the outer door and watched it pop open, watched the very sky cloud over as the sun tried to escape his appearance.
"UAAAAHHAAAHHHAAHHHHH!" cried the attendant.
Right, thought Dr. Ugly, reversing course and heading back into the recreation room. With a forcible stomp, he crushed the attendant's face underneath his bare foot. "erp," emitted the crushed skull of the attendant. And then, Dr. Ugly saw his chair, the lovely chair he'd been sitting in for the past eight years, and a wave of nostalgia rolled over him. Slowly he caressed the back of the chair, lovingly, longingly. Until--
"We have this footage," said the television, "of the strange flying human, as run through our computer and enhanced so that we can appreciate the detail. As you can see, the human's face is simply not discernible. Now here's the same footage, enhanced by computer, this time showing us what this human would look like if it were actually Bea Arthur of TV’s The Golden Girls..."
Yes, Dr. Ugly thought, remembering his mission. I will destroy him. I will!