The TV in my bedroom suddenly came on around 3AM. I’d been asleep. It’d woken me up.
I wiped my eyes, sat up in bed, and on the screen I saw the warlock. He was hanging upside down from the leg of a flying helicopter and told me telepathically that he’d decided to steal my soul. Then the TV flicked off.
I went back to sleep, thinking it was probably just a dream. But when I woke up, everything seemed askew.
First off, the walls in my apartment were painted hot pink, instead of the white they’d been before. And all the furniture was in different places.
And, as I stepped into the kitchen, all the pots and pans and dishes were scattered about, lying everywhere, like someone’d thrown them around.
I flicked on the coffee maker, the one possessed by the ghost of Charles Bukowski, and instead of brewing my coffee, it just made a hacking, wheezing sound and shut off.
Opening my refrigerator, one of the handguns I keep in there rang like a cell phone. I picked it up, stuck the barrel to my ear and answered. It was the warlock.
“Stole your soul, bitch!!” he taunted.
Politely I asked if I could have it back. But the warlock dodged the question entirely and went on to tell me that he was writing a musical about the Italian mafia. He said how it would star current and former mobsters, dancing and singing, and that it would be performed in public places, spontaneously, rather than in theaters.
I again asked if I could have my soul back. Sounding frustrated, he sighed and told me to come down to the art gallery, if I really wanted it. Then he hung up.
I put on a leotard, cowboy boots and hat and stole the rabbi next door’s pet ostrich and rode it down to the art gallery. When I got there, I tied the ostrich to a parking meter and saw Snooki and The Situation from that show “Jersey Shore” standing outside.
They had handheld video cameras and were shoving them into random people’s faces, shouting expletives, and making jokes about car bombs.
I ran past them, into the gallery. Inside was a narrow corridor that led to a dark, cavernous room.
In the room were a group of Sikhs, in turbans, sitting in a circle around a smart phone, which dangled by a USB cable from the ceiling. On the smart phone’s screen was looped video of masked terrorists on monkey bars and headless obese people on American streets. The Sikhs were humming some sort of mantra and staring at the phone’s screen.
Then my cell phone vibrated. It was a text from the warlock, asking: “Find it yet?”
“No” I typed back.
“Come to Dr. Walker’s office. It’s down the block.” He replied.
So I left the gallery. On my way out I saw Snooki and The Situation, lying dead on the sidewalk, bloody gunshot wounds pockmarking their bodies.
A man dressed as Ronald McDonald stood over them, thrusting his pelvis and filming the corpses with a handheld camera.
We made eye contact and he put his finger to his lips and made a shushing sound.
I continued down the street and arrived at a public bathroom. On the men’s door was “Dr. Walker DDS” spray painted in red letters. I walked in and saw the warlock handcuffed to a urinal. A hairy chested man wearing only a surgical mask, flip flops, and hot pink miniskirt was probing the warlock’s mouth with a switchblade.
From somewhere in the background, I could hear Guns N Roses' “Mr. Brownstone” playing softly.
The miniskirt man turned to me, pulled down his surgical mask, hacked and spit out a tiny key. The man looked exactly like Chuck Norris. I think it was Chuck Norris.
The Chuck Norris asked me, in German, if I’d seen Godzilla, last time I was in Tokyo. I shook my head.
At this Chuck Norris was angered and yelled, still in German, how Godzilla must have been there, and how could I miss him, swatting down planes, stomping on yellow people, and kicking over buildings?
I continued to shake my head and Chuck Norris shook his head back at me, sardonically, and proceeded to carve a large inverted crucifix into his stomach with the switchblade, laughing as he did so.
A window in the corner then shattered and a bunch of Japanese schoolgirls climbed in through it and rushed into one of the stalls, carrying Happy Meals and giggling.
Chuck Norris broke wind, stuck his hands down his miniskirt, fished around his crotch with the switchblade, and sliced off his penis. Then he flung the penis out the broken window and went into the stall w/the Japanese schoolgirls, slammed the door shut and started banging on the closed door and shrieking.
I turned to the warlock. Blood streamed down his mouth, to his neck and chest. Breaking into tears, he asked me solemnly if I really wanted my soul back. I told him yes. He asked me to free him, and, picking up the key Chuck Norris had spit to the floor, I did.
The warlock wiped at his bloody mouth with his shirtsleeve and unzipped his fanny pack. From it, he produced a Ronald McDonald voodoo doll with a dead wasp scotch-taped to its face and extended the doll to me.
Then he bowed his head and whimpered: “He won’t leave me alone.”
