Chapter 26

Table of Contents

At the Gasden Motel in Cornudo, Arizona, management was in a festive mood.  Defying all hospitality industry decorum, Little Fucker was chasing Mike around the office in a scandalous fashion.  Just for fun, Mike had tied a towel around the kid's head and they were playing a game called terrorist vs. infidel.  Mike had given the kid a soccer ball left behind in one of the rooms, and he was pretending it was a bomb he was going to kill Mike with.

"Ugh!  Help!"  Mike screamed.  "Little towel-head terrorist fucker on the loose!"

"Towe-head tehwist fuckah!" Little F growled, and threw the ball at Mike.  He was catching up fast on his bombed-out childhood.

Strictly for lolz, while Mike was busy on the dark web he had ordered an Osama Bin-Laden playset for Little F off some sketchy middle eastern website.  The kit contained action figures of Osama and two of his bearded goons, all wearing broad grins and carrying AKs and rocket launchers.  It also had a jeep so Osama and his pals could race around the desert, blowing shit up and causing mayhem.  Little F really seemed to get into the toy.  "He's got it in his blood," Mike thought, wondering if he should be worried.

At this point Marisol let herself into the room, using the key that Mike had given her.  "This is really inappropriate in so many ways," she said, seeing Little F's disguise and the plastic mini-terrorists stationed around the room, hunting for plastic infidels to slaughter.  "I'm calling Homeland Security." 

Mike went over and kissed her like he had never kissed that cunt Lisa.  Little F turned his attention to his terrorist toys, because this usually meant the grown ups would disappear for a while.  But not today, because Mike had things to do in San Diego and had to get an early start.  "I guess I better get going," he said.  "You sure this is okay?"

"Absolutely. The Fatwa and I will have a great time while you are gone.”

“He might stone you. His holy book does not approve of unveiled females.”

“I’ll make sure he can’t go outside to collect rocks.”

"I won't be gone long.  I'll spend the night with my Dad and be back tomorrow.  Thanks again."

Marisol wrapped her arms around Mike's shoulders.  "Quit saying thanks, Mike.  We're kind of a family now, aren't we?"

"I hope so."  She kissed him again and he copped a discrete feel of her ass for the road.  Then he grabbed the Herr's medals and Little F's postcards, which he threw into an empty duffel bag, next to another that contained his change of clothes.

"By the way.  The Earl is in arrears by a week.  He's probably off chasing some rare bird up a dry creek and forgot to pay.  Just say it's jolly good and don't kick him out.  He gives this place a little dignity."

Traveling down the I-8 West, with its utter lack of sensory stimulation, Mike's mind was free to ponder many things.  Marisol mostly occupied his thoughts, filing him with a warm glow in more than one place.  The image of her smile shot beams of starlight through his heart.  Marisol didn't have what one would call a supernova smile, but its radiance was definitely somewhere along the main sequence.

Passing by El Centro, Mike's mood grew gloomier, in direct proportion to the increasing distance between he and the object of his affection.  Here he started thinking about the work he was doing for Danny, hacking the dark web credit card transactions of the crooks and creeps on the list.  Danny had not been lying that they were unsavory characters, both the vile vendors and their demented clients.  Mike had never been exposed to such unspeakable perversions in his life.  Yeah, he had jacked off to a little porn, what guy had not, but it was the kind featuring adults of the age of consent, not horrified children or women being tortured and sometimes killed after or during sexual abuse.  The problem for Mike was that he had to hack his way in through the URL bars of these sites, so sometimes his eyes and soul were scalded by the filth there.

"Just skim a little off each account, don't make it too noticeable," Danny warned him at the outset.

"I thought the idea was to destroy these bastards," Mike reminded him.

"Yeah but we don't want to scare them away just yet.  We have to build up a war chest first.  Then we'll use it to take them down."

This seemed like a satisfactory explanation, but Mike still couldn't help feeling a little sketched out.  What sketched him out the most is that he liked doing it.  It made him feel relevant again.  It made him feel that he was back in the game, but without the baggage the game entailed.  Mike had never liked being the boss.  He loved writing code, he loved the creative process of developing software, he was even had a fair hand for creative design, but he didn't like all the administrative and political bullshit.  He sucked at Marketing.  He didn't know shit about Finance.  Most significant, he didn't know how to deal with the sharks circling around, trying to tear off chunks from his intellectual property, and his soul.  He had finally said fuck it and sold.

Now he missed it, he might as well admit that he missed it. Well, parts of it.  Being retired at 28 was not turning out as planned.  Vacuuming floors, scrubbing toilets, painting then repainting walls was not what he thought he would be doing at 28. Was this why he was willing to do Danny Valero's bidding, even though there was a faint, rotten odor of sun-baked roadkill lingering around it?

Mike swirled into San Diego like the June gloom, then went onto his Dad’s condo in the older part of Chula Vista.  Dad was happy there and would not let Mike upgrade his residence.  The two greeted each other in nonchalant, unaffectionate Gasden fashion, like they had seen each other 10 minutes ago.

"So how are things with Lisa?" Dad asked.

"I dumped her Dad," said Mike.

"That's a relief.  You finally opened your eyes."

Mike grimaced.  He didn't appreciate the implication that he had been acting stupid, even when it was true.  "You could say my eyes were just shifted to someone else.”

Mike's Dad perked up.  "Oh, that's interesting.  Who is she, or dare I say, he?"

"I'm not gay Dad.  Why does everybody think I'm gay?"

"Because you act very androgynous.  You pluck your eyebrows for Christ's sakes.  Healthy heterosexual men don't pluck their eyebrows.  You want a beer?"

"S-Sure."

"That's encouraging.  That's a first.  You can't get Appletinis in the desert?  So tell me about this girl."

"You're not going to like it Dad.  After I tell you you're going to wish Lisa was back.  But I have to tell you sooner or later, because it might be serious."

"You haven't put a ring on her finger yet, have you?"

Mike hesitated, because although there was no physical ring yet, he felt a connecting loop to Marisol's soul, like the lasso the priest puts around the couple at a Catholic wedding, but in a metaphysical sense.

"Have you?" his Dad repeated.

"No," Mike said, sounding disappointed, as if this constituted some sort of moral failure on his part.

"Then you still have a chance to see what she's made of before you take the leap.  What's she like?"

"Dad, I have to be honest.  Brace yourself.  She used to be a porn star."

If this had been a father son scene written to formula, Mike’s Dad’s beer would have gone through his nose.  It was not a father-son scene written to formula, but beer really did go through his nose.

"I told you you wouldn't like it."

"Which one?" Mike's Dad said as he wiped his chin with the back of his hand.

"What?"

"Which porn star?"

“Does that matter? Are you going to Google her? I don’t want you to Google her.”

"I gotta know, in case I..."

"In case you what?  I am so going to hurl with this mental image forming in my head.  Don't look at porn. I don’t want you fapping to my fiancee.”

Mike's Dad took another swig of beer, to replace the one lost in his nostrils.  "Well I try not to but...you know, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.  Damn, my rockstar millionaire sun dates pornstars.  This is a proud moment."

"It's not supposed to be a proud moment. And she's not a porn star anymore. Let’s be clear.”

A semi-uncomfortable pause ensued, after which Mike's Dad said "Just tell me which one, so I can avoid her, just in case my willpower is flogging, flagging."

"Weird choice of words."

"Son, this is exactly the sort of thing you are going to be subjected to while dating a porn star. Did you think about that?”

"Former porn star."  Mike sat upright in his chair like he was getting ready to bolt.  "Okay, her porn name was Hannah Heat."

Mike's Dad's eyes bugged out, but he held his beer in.  "Wow!  You got great taste. I just can’t believe a girl that hot likes you."

"You know who she is?"

"Sure.  I'm not a monk cloistered away in the desert like you. Ha ha. I guess the devil really does send voluptuous women to tempt cloistered saints in the desert, like Saint Anthony. You ever heard the story of St. Anthony? I should have been a monk.”

Mike sat brooding, because his Dad wasn't taking this the way he expected him to.  Instead of trying to talk him out of a potentially dangerous affair, his Dad was applauding him for bagging a bodacious babe.  There was clearly a lack of parental concern on his Father’s part.

"Dad, I'm serious about her.  She's not the kind of girl you think.  She's not vapid, she's very smart.  She's loving too.  She regrets what she did, but she kind of got suckered into it.  But there's one more thing you have to know."

"It gets better?"

"Stop goofing around..  I'm trying to be serious.  She can't have kids."

Mike's Dad put his beer on the table so he could properly metabolize this news.  "You always said you never wanted kids anyway."

"I know Dad, but people change their minds.  You know I'm really stubborn, so I  always say never when you bug me about it. But the truth is, it's nice to have the option.  It's sort of disappointing."

Mike's Dad took a deep breath and turned his head away.  He tapped his fingers on the table. "You want to know something?  When you walked in here today you looked more alive than I've seen you in a long time. You had a spring in your step.  Admit it or not, that bitch Lisa had you fulminating about her fidelity all the time, but you didn't believe your own protests. Interesting that your pornstar girlfriend, ex pornstar girlfriend, does not cause you such doubt. Maybe you've got something good going there.  Anyhow, it is possible that dickless brother of yours will father a child someday by some miracle of immaculate conception and make me a grandfather.  I guess me and every other man wants to be a grandpa, except for a handful of androgynous narcissists like you, but the days of Fathers hand picking brides for their sons went out in the Middle Ages. I can deal with it."

Mike seemed pleased by this fatherly speech.  "Okay Dad, we have some work to do.  We have to go to the bank."

"What for?"

"I'm going to give you all my money.."

"Why?  Are you in trouble."

"In Cornudo trouble is always crawling out of the desert, on any number of legs. Or no legs. I've got to be ready. I’m not in any immediate danger but just in case.”

“You know I won’t touch it.”

“That’s why I’m picking you.”

Mike and his Dad went to a half dozen banks.  Mike carried along the duffel bag in the trunk of Mike’s Dad’s car. When they were finished, there were still a few hours until his appointment with the Arabic professor at San Diego State, so he decided to drop off the Herr's medals.

Herr Müeller had retired to a place called Viatica Manor.  The facility advertised Independent & Assisted Living, Memory Care & More.  Mike considered what more meant. Diaper change? He asked himself what sort of lewd and unspeakable acts were being committed against Senior Citizens behind the cheerful banner of & more, even while the old farts' bank accounts were steadily emptied.

He also wondered how the Herr would receive him.  The two didn't exactly have an amicable history, dating back to years before Mike had purchased the Herr's motel.  The feud started when Mike had been driving back to San Diego from Mesa, where his grandfather lived. As often happens on long, lonely, completely depopulated stretches of Arizona road, Mike had been overcome with the need to pee.  It was July, the monsoon season, when intense storms come out of the clear blue sky to fill the gullies in seconds.  Mike's bladder, just recently emptied in Gila Bend, experienced a 24 ounce Monster-energy monsoon that filled his own watershed with raging, torrential runoff.  He wasn't going to make it to Yuma.  He needed to pull over immediately.

Immediately came in the form of the Tachna-Cornudo exit.  With sweet surcease in sight Mike swerved left, toward Cornudo.  The café on his right, which had the outward appearance of serving the dozen or more varieties of roadkill that Arizona's Interstate System had to offer, meant stopping and buying something.  He had ten bucks in his pocket, with which he hoped to buy dinner. The gas station on the left had a CLOSED sign posted, and at any rate appeared to be just a front for the torture and dismemberment of wayward motorists, held in shackles behind the roll-down, ramshackle metal door of its garage.  The only hope for Mike's bursting bladder, its rusting rivets straining painfully under the intense weight of unbearable hydrostatic pressure, was a clump of bushes on the edge of a motel parking lot.  Mike aimed for it.

There were no cars in the large lot, which was reverting back to nature through the insidious advance of desert weeds that worked their way through untidy fault lines in the asphalt.  The paint of the establishment peeled like the bark of a Eucalyptus tree, and pieces of tar from the roof had crumbled down onto the walkway surrounding the habitations.  Mike was pretty sure the place was shut down and If not, whatever authority governed human activity in this backwater should condemn it immediately. If he left a puddle behind it would evaporate in seconds, leaving a crystalline residue that would blow into the alkali flats beyond. Who would care?

In the high, muggy heat of July, people were shuttered behind sun-blocking shades, the whir of their air conditioners muffling whatever audible intrusions might creep in from the desert. Mike felt pretty sure that if he stopped to piss in these weeds at the edge of the parking lot, no one would see or hear him.

High pressure liquid roared out of his bladder like the spring runoff from the Sierra snowpack after an El Niño winter.  Mike sighed orgasmically, but began to feel exposed as the flow continued unabated.  How was it possible for human tissue to dispense of such a vast reservoir of water without going into severe dehydration and causing seizures, brought on by a lack of electrolyte homeostasis? Enough already.

As the biological faucet flowed without cessation, the hills grew eyes.  Mike had the undeniable sensation that people were looking at him. Creepy desert people were eyeing his activity with murder and cannibalism in mind. Mike wanted to cut off the valve but his body protested with twin spasms of pain in the renal areas.  Then, like a mummified zombie arising from the ruins of this ghost town motel, a deranged, disheveled old man began to plod in Mike's direction, brandishing a broom as if it were a hunter's lance.

The angry, rampaging, undead being was dressed in a heavy woolen shirt tucked neatly into corduroy trousers, their wearer apparently having missed the memo about the extinction of the fabric.  As such, he was clad in a fossil that matched the fossilization of his biological being.   The man wasn't so much old as eroded by the heat and wind of the desert, because the energy with which he moved toward Mike proved he was still young enough to inflict him grave bodily injury.

"Vat are you doing on my property?  Getten Sie off my property!" the man yelled, then uttered what were obviously curses and imprecations in some Teutonic tongue.

"Hey calm down!" Mike shrieked, still not ready to reel it in.  "I'm just urinating in the weeds over here.  I'm not hurting anything!"

"Raus!  Raus!" the Herr commanded, as if he were still wearing the Schirmmütze cap of a Lüftwaffe officer.  Mike had no choice but to disobey his still submerged kidneys, and they protested the insubordination by delivering stabbing pain to his lower back.  He zipped it with drops spraying everywhere, then hopped in his car and started the engine, escaping just before the Herr could thrash him with the broom he wielded like a Field Marshall's baton.

"Geh zur Hölle!" the Herr yelled, shaking his fist in Mike's rearview mirror.  Out of impulse, Mike flipped him the bird out the window.  Later he kind of regretted this, realizing the Herr had only been defending his property.  But to Mike it was a severe overreaction to watering the weeds at the back of his dilapidated, squalid establishment, and he was sure the Herr had cursed him to several generations in his barbaric language.

Mike drove on to Yuma and finished draining his ravaged bladder in a gas station bathroom, while at the same time declaring undying phony war against the Herr.

From then on, whenever Mike just happened to be driving past Cornudo, and sometimes he took long detours to just happen to be there, he would pull a mostly harmless prank on the Herr.  He lit a bag of dog turds on the motel front door, the smell of which somewhat improving the fragrance of the place.  He smeared Nutella on the undersides of the Herr's car door handles.  At Christmas, Mike gift-wrapped the Herr’s old Mercedes. He rigged a bottle of Canola oil to dump on the proprietor when he went outside.  He threw a Febreeze bomb into the motel lobby while yelling Feuer!.  All of these were good, wholesome, harmless college trolling techniques.

But the ultimate troll came later, because Mike's offended and dialysis-bound kidneys demanded a more severe retribution for the insult visited upon them.  Even though he had not yet risen above the infantile mentality of troll and prankster, Mike somehow found himself the proprietor of his own software company.  From the Fortress of Solitude of his office, he would keep his cyber-eye peeled on the Herr so he could better plot his next attack.  He subscribed to the online Wellton newsletter, where he read that a bestiality suspect was arraigned in Wellton for having sex with a horse.  The Border Patrol had also seized drugs, fraudulent documents, and arrested seven illegal aliens.  Then somebody wrote a forum post asking if anybody knew the whereabouts of her long lost half sister, but apparently the half sister had left Wellton so long ago no one remembered, or, judging by the dullard personality of the comment author, paid off her friends to keep her incognito.  At any rate, no one answered the plea.

Then, about four or five items down, there was a post about Josef Müeller being unable to find a buyer for his famous Roadrunner Motor Inn.  The Herr wanted to go into retirement, but couldn't find any takers at his asking price.

"Serves that grouchy old Nazi right," somebody commented.

"Hitler's bones are probably buried underneath the motel," said another.

"I'll trade him a pot of Sauerkraut," from a third.

"Escaped from the Papago Park POW camp straight into the Roadrunner and never left," still a fourth.

The latter observation was not too far from the truth, but Mike couldn't know that.  Mike was content that the comments seemed to justify his trolling, on the basis of the Herr being a mean old crank that nobody loved.

Even better, the article pointed out the supreme opportunity for the ultimate troll.  The Mother of all Trolls.  The troll to end all Trolls.  He would buy the Roadrunner Motor Inn at full asking price, but first piss in the parking lot in broad daylight and make Herr Josef Müeller watch.

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Image - Thunderstorm over El Centro, CA by JacobSA2019, altered into black and white by the blog author