Notes, from the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 82, Magenta Feathers. It was like a realization or revelation or something.
There I was in my apartment, stealing about the connections my brain was making between Park and Cami and Boom. I had the tools to deal with it the whole time. The tool I got from Jessica, pretty simple, but usually effective. Put the assholes in a steel photograph and burn the photograph while I shortle.
And like I said, if that doesn't work, I have the backup plan, the polyplan. Put them in a home movie where they are choking and vomiting and screaming. The traitors. So I made a mental picture of Cami the cunt and parked the prick and lit the bastards on fire.
It was a nice slow burn. Didn't work. So I ran the home moving on them. Haha, that's right you fuckers.
Enjoy the tasty Samanello with battery acid. Then I got up and went downstairs and lit up and paced the sidewalk. I tried it down to the corner of Bodega and bought a quarter of milk. I inhaled pretty deep through my nose and shrugged my shoulders loose.
Yep, I thought. They know each other and they're laughing about me. He probably fucked her during that. In the ass.
In a threesome with Belinda. What I hated most of all was they thought I was too stupid to figure it out. How's that for a state of mind? I'm not bragging about it.
It was painful. Like a bruise you can't keep from jabbing with your thumb. I went upstairs and popped into Sammy's room. Daddy just had to run down and get some milk, but he's back.
I showed him the milk cart and I bought as a prop for this alibi. Okay. Sam said he was in Zen mode with his feathery mastodon. Hey Sam, is that the same feathery mastodon?
Nope. He said this one is gay. This one has more feathers than they're mostly magenta. He knew what magenta meant and he pronounced it without stumbling.
I was a little shocked. Do they call it gay on the website? Nope. He cried.
That's what Harry calls it. There were a few seconds of complete silence while I stared at the magenta mastodon on his screen. Wow, I said it potentially. More feathers.
That's like magic. He looked up at me with this look that said feathers were dollars and now he knew how to get more. Yeah. He growled.
I closed his door gently and went in the kitchen to pop the milk in the fridge. I'd have a conversation with Harry about the whole gay mastodon thing later if I remembered. Or maybe I'll have Junior do the enhanced interrogation. I thought.
Then my brain shifted back to the whole parp cami conundrum. I tried to burn picture technique again. Nope. The vomiting and screaming technique also failed.
Again. My brain insisted. They're fucking you insufferable chump. So I called up Jessica.
You know, emergency. I left a frantic voicemail. She called back about an hour later and fixed me in like five minutes. She sighed like my mom.
Oh, Paul. She said, are you serious? And then she giggled. Ha ha ha ha.
Very unphd like, but it did the trick. All I needed was somebody from the outside world to give me a really clear sense of how nuts I sounded and that normal people, people not in the middle of it all, could look at the same facts I was looking at and see nothing wrong and even pity my craziness. I said, thanks a bunch. And hung up.
I stretched out on myself and let the relief sink in for a few minutes. I'm such a dick, I thought. Then I thought, time for another cigarette. But my rule is don't leave Sammy alone unless it's an emergency, even a paranoid emergency.
And I wasn't having one of those at the moment. Plus, I'd already left him alone twice. At first time I left him in Harry alone so I could call Arvo. And then that second time because thinking about parpen cami was freaking me out, so getting a smoke was a categorical imperative.
I put my nicotine craving on some mental back burner and called up parp to schedule pick up of his roundabout in Gold Card. We agreed to meet at the Starbucks in his neighborhood. Yeah, the one at worldwide plaza. The same one I went to for coffee on the morning after the inaugural ball.
If you've gotten this far in my tale of vengeance and justice, you've probably noticed. I mentioned Starbucks a lot. But if it's 100 years from now, they might not have Starbucks anymore, so let me fill you futureistas in. Starbucks was everywhere.
It had decent coffee. It made a lot of money. And most of us know money makes you a psychopath eventually. So we citizens of the early 21st century didn't really trust it, but we got our coffee there anyway and made excuses about being slaves to the man.
Except the parp. He liked Starbucks and he liked that they made a lot of money. The profit motive makes the world go round. He said, compassion will get you spit-filled Senka in muddy cups from a soup kitchen run by the pimp of a politician's hooker.
So as soon as Junior got back from her plateate with the Sue Gasperino, I got on the bus from Midtown in Medparpe. And Starbucks at Worldwide Classic. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist.
Notes from the Upper West Side. Copyright 2021 by Dan Rench.