The Life Story of SuperBad: Chapter One: 87 Cents

What's that "Chapter One," bullshit, children? Fergit that, SuperBad wanna tell you a story about everything you need to know about SuperBad hisself.

Now, normal-like, me and the Bad Mother got each other's back full-time; we share a ride, we share our jobs, and when he's all passed out and so drunk that his stilt is as limp as a celery stick, I share his women. Couple times a night, mostly.

But sometimes a man has to breathe free air. Thusly I, Superbad, decided when I abandoned Bad Mother's drunk-ass self in that Oregon whorehouse, him just delirious and screaming lines from Othello same time he's guzzling full bottles of Jack, so everything comes out, like

"Think, my lord!
By heaven, he echoes me,
As if there were some monguhburburble ... in his thought
Too hideous to gulp gulp glug something:
Glug glug glug gulp smack glup gulp
hooooooooark smack ahhhh."

Right, so you see why I gotta get out and clear my head.

So I tooled the BadAss Mobile towards the edge of dirtwater Corvalis, checking out the round-hipped college girls in their cutoff Levis strolling to their one-up efficiencies and farm communes they keep cause it's cheaper than living on OSU campus. I tooled that tricked-out ride to the some Mom-n-Pop jackshit drug store on the side of the road, screeched in across three handicapped spaces and kneecapped the fucking fool who tried to give me pressure about it.

The pale, scrawny dope behind the counter was, maybe, seventeen. "Hey Dante!" I shouted, "You got Samson Shag?"

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"I swear to God," I said as I flipped back my jacket, showing my Mk23 Mod 0 American Army issue automatic in its custom-fitted sharkskin shoulder holster, "You start giving me that whiny, tired 'I'm not even supposed to BE here today' shit and you're gonna end up as the punctuation on a sentence full of bullets and beat-down. Now, you don't understand my question, you answer from the perspective that you are in a state of ignorance and require my elucidation to better yourself, you understand?"

"Um..."

"Otherwise, I take your impertinence to mean that you consider my need to make a request of you to be a direct confrontation, and I will behave in kind."

"Um..."

"And unless you want to recreate a work environment not dissimilar to that as shown in the opening of the riveting supernatural drama From Dusk Til Dawn, if you know what I mean, and I think you will, explosively, you'd best take a lighter tone while I'm still sober enough to appreciate your recently acquired timidity."

"Um."

"I allow time for rebuttal."

***

Chapter Two: Halfzware Shag

Smoke break, children. SuperBad only smokes hand-rolled cigarinos filled with Samson Halfzware Shag, which in German means "It's Eating the Chrome Off The Pipes." This shit turns ordinary rolling papers pitch black on the first inhale, and turns the first inhale into a fight over life and death. Needless to say, I excersice brand loyalty religiously.

Now where did I leave off? Oh yeah, that's right. Threatening the clerk.

Okay, well, yeah. Things settle down after that, and I'm all giving him the "shopping list," like, right? I say "Hop to, Standish, and set me up. I need a booklet of King-Size Smoking Eco papers, Samson brand tobaccy, three of them big bottles of Jack, three boxes of those rainbow colored Trojans, nudie girl lighter, two sticks Peccaree smoky Jalapeno beef fucking jerky, Maxim, Playboy, Nugget and anything you got European and a big damn bottle of them Vitamin C tablets, cause I have a powerful thirst for nutrients, and damn but that shit better be in paper bags cause I don't cotton to that flimsy old-lady carrying psycho-eco-my ass plastic shit."

So the little puss finished loading my bags, I pick em up and slap down my cash on the counter --- same amount I always gots, Eighty-seven cents in change and a hundred dollar bill. I'm walking out and I hear this peep behind me.

"Sir, I -- I have to total that up."

I put down the bags and reached behind me, readjusted the standard armed forces issue Colt 45 I keep in a holster along the small of my back, and put my hands on the counter "Dammit, brother, what were you doing while you was putting these things in their bags? Usual like, clerk is ringing the shit up while he's bagging. What've you been doing over there."

The powerful stank of fresh urine rising from the floor beneath him was all the answer I needed.

"Fine, count it up." I leaned with my back against the counter, hands in my pocket, chewing on an unlit smoke waiting for the jamoke to get his act together and do the count. After too damn long for my tastes, I hear him speak.

"Sir?"

"Yeah, what dammit?"

"The total ... um ..."

"Yeah?" I turned to look at him.

"It's ... um ... $100.87"

My stare could've outlasted the movement of glaciers. Eyes focused right on him, I spoke through my tightened, grim tone "That's right brother, what I said."

And that's when the robbers kicked open the door...

***

Chapter Three: Burning Rubber, Europorn and a Legion Of Super Heroes Comic Book

(inhales deeply on an ebony black cigarino)

So driving away from the smoking ruins, the hood of the BadAssMobile resounding with the metallic thunder of a thousand pieces of debris raining down upon it, I popped the empty magazine from my Glock and tossed the spent weapon in the passenger seat, where it sidled down between my recently-purchased bags of necessities. I lit my cigarino, and threw the lighter through the window, and as I turned onto the dirt road taking me back to the whorehouse where I'd left Bad Mother, I could swear I heard the garbled screams from the burned, charred throat of that idiot clerk.

Course, that was impossible; I'd decapitated him by firing forty rounds at point blank range into his neck.

Above me, the sky was turning as dark as the fuming wreck I'd left behind. On some immortal tapestry, the grand pageant of the universe was staged in a play where temporal, flimsy words were replaced by unspeakable hues of indigo and white. Under inky oceans of nothing and bright punctuations of burning life, I stopped the BadAssMobile and shut off the engine.

It hissed and popped, bristling like a vicious animal unwillingly held at bay. Cooling in the encroaching twilight, it and I were perched on a small hill, awash in a sea of fertile earth and waving strands of ochre, waning blades of grass. Miles away, small lights flickered on - at first, hesitantly, but then more boldly - in what appeared to be a careful orchestration of illuminated glory.

Lost in that quietude, buffeted by waves of silence, I reached into the passenger seat and tugged an old magazine from under the bags.

I whacked off, reading my Legion of Super-Heroes comic.

Then, gunning the engine, I tore off blindly across the county road. I noted with satisfaction that the last fragments of meat, muscle and bone left from those dumb-ass robbers were finally ground up by the axle and spewed out behind me in a gory spray.

Hope Bad Mother left me some whores.