My First Attempt at UA Fiction, re-edited…

Mackey’s End

I got lucky when Mackey checked out of The Bradon Manors Motor Lodge. It was like someone reached up and pried a big, hungry monkey right off of my back. The guy brought problems along behind him like a couple of ugly mutt dogs on a leash. Man, am I glad to have that cat out of my establishment.

If it had just been Mackey, everything would have stayed copasetic. He wasn’t the worst boozened old sod to expire in a Cahuenga Boulevard flophouse. He actually paid his rent fairly regularly and seemed too played out to bring around drugs, weaponry or hookers. These attributes made him a regular charmer compared to some of the “guests” I have on my books at the establishment.

Mackey was a tired, old man who seemed to want to peacefully finish out his string. He was pleasant, if you talked him up; invisible if you didn’t. He seemed to spend his whole life trying to convince you and everybody else he really wasn’t there. I was happy to play along, as long as he showed up with the scratch on rent paying day.

It wasn’t Mackey I minded at all, it was that guy Muddy Chambers who kept asking about him. Chambers looked like a distilled spirit of intense violence. His body was bulky, powerful and loomed over anyone he stood near. He was large enough to have at least played O-Line at USC.

His clothing never changed. He wore the same torn and fluid-stained slacks and an old Army Surplus field coat. The name tag read “Chambe” with the “rs” presumably smudged out by accumulated grime. He wore a ratty, grayish T-shirt that read “Bully” and had a picture of some scary-looking monster rising up in a funnel cloud. It was always the same outfit, and it was always puke-up filthy. People took their cars to Jiffy Lube and changed their oil more frequently than that cat changed his attire.

I could smell the guy coming before he came through the door and into my building’s outer lobby. In a city with as many homeless individuals as Hollywood, California, it would be rough smelling badly enough to be distinguishable by odor. Chambers managed.

His face was scarred from more than one pointed weapon. His nose had been broken at least once; it hung wrong in proportion to the rest of his face. At least one of Chambers’ ears looked like he had come in second to a tom cat in an alley fight. But worst of all, his right eye seemed always yea close to distending and popping out when he got impatient with me for not producing Mackey.

Mackey wanted it that way. The only thing I remember him ever asking me to do was to not tell Muddy Chambers he was here no matter what. He had a desperate, pleading way of asking this favor. It was like Mackey would drop off his buzz all of a sudden, and get the shakes at the mention of Muddy’s name.

If Muddy Chambers were after me, I’d get the shakes as well. That guy would scare the mustache off The Devil. I suggested to Mackey he get a restraining order on the creepy SOB. Mackey sadly shook his head.

“Wouldn’t stop it. Some things don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

I got scared enough of the gorilla to complain to LA’s boys in blue. I described the man in vivid, unpleasant detail. They came up empty on the name and told me they talked to a few of the regulars living under the Pasadena Freeway underpass up the way. No one had even heard of Muddy Chambers.

Three days ago, Chambers came to the front desk, ugly business as usual. He leered over the desk and breathed on me enough for me to know what Jeffrey Dahmer must have smelled like before he chewed a mint.

“I want to see Mackey.” He announces, shamelessly forgetting the magic word “please.”

“So do I, Muddy.” I smart off back. “He’s been owing me for a day or two.”

I wanted this cretinous Moorlock to vanish from my doorstep. A couple of the regulars just sat on a broken sofa in the lobby and watched with interest. Having Muddy Chambers show up beat spending your evening passed out at the cheap movie house near Hollywood and Ivar. He was a walking freak show; free to the public.

He then hesitated in a primal, menacing way. He drew himself up, as if he were about to poor over the threshold of my window as angry tide to inundate my office cubical with hatred and malice. His shoulders drew up behind his barrel of a neck like the hood of a cobra. He gave me that stare of his that made that right eye look exceedingly precarious with respect to its perch in the proper socket.

“Don’t f—k with me, Monkey Boy.” He said in a low, lupine growl. “He owes me so much more.”

At this point, I’m fingering the broken shotgun I keep below the desk. The one I’ve stenciled “Complaint Department” on the barrel of just for s—ts and giggles. I’m not sure The Great State of Queerifornica would consider this a righteous shoot, but I knew who I planned on sending off if it had to be him or me.

I’m no believer in magic and am assuredly not one of the Wiccans that trolls around Hollywood with a pentagram around their neck. I don’t believe in God either. If there’s a force out there, stay away from it. It’s there to screw you in any hole it can find available. About the only thing I believe is that I believe I’ll have another cold one.

But then old Muddy does something that David Copperfield wishes he had thought of first. He then reaches into his raggedy coat and pulls out a full-blown Poulin Woodmaster and fires the sucker up right in my lobby. The saw growls and belches foul, stinking diesel fumes. The two old bubbas on the couch stopped enjoying the show. They flattened against the wall and began oozing back towards the exit.

While I’m getting over the initial stun and snapping the gun together, Muddy goes to work on the wooden awning in front of my cash cage and sends the splinters flying. He laughs at the entropic redecoration of the lobby and says to me. “You’re dead, B—h! Timber!”

I lock in to the here and now and whip my gun up to level. I unloaded it right in Chambers’ ugly face. The recoil knocked me back and caused the barrel to incline slightly upward by the time the round was expended. The noise reverberated and rang both my eardrums like a fire alarm. Outside on the street, at least a couple car alarms sounded a cacophonic protest.

The buckshot caught Big, Tall and Ugly right between his neck and his vile-smelling kisser. The lead blew off freakishly awful chunks of that modern art masterpiece of a mug. It exposed part of his pallet which afforded me a breathtaking view of greenish, rotting teeth in horrendous disrepair.

The disgusting visitor to my humble establishment of commerce hardly even flinched. He grinned at me in a stupid manner and licked off some of the gore. He seemed to kind of like the taste. He lowered the saw and began to blow through the wood that was left between him and me. I could see the first couple of teeth of his saw buzzing through the cheaply constructed booth I sat in. A small residue of sawdust began collecting on my pants and shirt.

It was at this juncture where The Good Lord had had enough of The Muddy Chambers Show and decided to intervene for my sake. Mackey comes out from the back rooms looking a little bit drunk, a tad bit peeved and a whole lot confused and asked. “What’s all this G– —n racket!?”

Chambers turned away from me and towards Mackey. He shuffled his feet like a toy sci-fi robot and pivoted his shoulders stiffly. His saw still revved and belched oily diesel fumes, but at least its business end wasn’t in any portion of my personal space.

From what I saw of his profile, he seemed to grin like an imbecile. I doubt he found this a difficult task. He looked at Mackey and got this really hungry expression on whatever was left of his ruined face. He puts down the Woodmaster and says. “ I’m a-squeezing you with my bare hands.”

Mackey backs off a couple of steps looking very, very frightened. I noticed an uncomfortable wet stain spreading across the front of my pants as I watched the badly injured Muddy Chambers slowly close on Mackey. I knew of nothing I or anyone else could do to prevent Muddy Chambers from popping poor, old harmless Mackey like a teenager in front of the mirror, does with his zits.

Mackey then pulls out a flask of Bowman’s Virginia Vodka. It’s the really cheap, awful stuff with the garish red label. It goes for $2.50 a pint and will take baked-on dirt off your carburetor in a pinch. I can’t think of what else it does well. I wondered if the dumb, old coot would actually offer the flask to Muddy as a desperate attempt at propitiation.

Mackey gets his composure back and braces himself further with a shot of the awful, viscous vodka. “Fire, Water, Burn.” He says. Then he hammered down a good pint and half of the bad stuff. He kept a lot in his mouth, which made his cheeks poke out like those of an Elder Grandmaster chipmunk.

Chambers didn’t know what to make of this whole scene, but saw no reason not to keep moving in on his adversary. His hands now extended towards Mackey like one of the dorky-looking zombies in “Night of the Living Dead.”

Mackey then exhaled a stream of the Russian Tonsil-Polish. It struck Muddy flush in his chest and then ignited in a majestic, arcing blue flame. Mackey continued spitting fire until his entire mouthful had been directed at his adversary in the manner of a flame-thrower in a WW II movie. Mackey collapsed on the floor from this exertion.

Chambers did anything but collapse. His rudimentary schooling had apparently lacked the lesson entitled “Stop, Drop and Roll.” Muddy flounced around like a ballerina on PCP. He bounced off of walls and furniture and complained about his flame deluge in a high-pitched keening wail.

“Eeeeeee-Aggghhh, Eeeeeee!” He commented repetitively.

The flames that came off him were beautiful somehow. Every so often a piece of him would slough off and lay on the moldy, old carpet like a smoldering pile off cow dung. It was a testament to the profound disrepair of the carpet that none of it willingly ignited as the Muddy Chambers torch careened aimlessly around the room.

Mackey lay there looking peaceful. He was like a little baby, enjoying an afternoon nap. Except for one problem, his chest wouldn’t rise and fall.

Chambers at last fell down and he couldn’t get up. He sort of halfway raised an arm, as if he expected someone to pick him up, dust him off and hand him back his chainsaw as a personal favor. Naturally, no one did. I called 9-1-1 and am not even sure what I told them to send over. The 82nd Airborne almost seemed appropriate for the situation at hand.

When the cops and the ambulances arrived, I was putting the now-defunct Chambers out with a baby fire extinguisher that I stow in my little booth, next to “Complaint Department.” It wasn’t doing him or me any good and the boy just didn’t smell right, even in death. I guess stink just isn’t very flammable.

Maybe I considered it good form for the LAPD to at least find me trying to help one of the two collapsed individuals strewn about my business establishment. It took about four hours for Occifer Shady of The LAPD to decide he didn’t even care enough to disbelieve my rather inarticulate account of what had happened. He just had two dead Rum Blossoms that needed to be tagged and bagged.

My residents liked the free entertainment and stood around the lobby gawking. By 3am, things were kind of back to normal, in a f—ed –up, East Hollywood sort of a way.