Made in China Chapter 15

I assume Hit the Road, Jack is my indication that I have slept long enough and that it is time for me to go. I can’t explain it any other way. Everything happens for a reason. I flick off the TV by the console, a little square seldom-used button. Goodbye, Ray Charles via a 19-inch Zenith TV. People once had 60-inch televisions which makes me laugh thinking of the preposterousness of it and them. They mounted them like pictures but they never lasted more than ten years. That was the age of disposable, made in China, cheap plastics and electronics. “The Disposable Age” which refers to both people and products. I think I slept for six hours. Maybe more, maybe less. The knock repeats. I had forgotten I heard it at all until it did again. I am wary of who it could be so I pull out my Colt Dragoon from my left rib holster and steady it parallel to the cigarette and cum-stained avocado carpet, cock the hammer with my thumb and grab the door knob with my other hand. I try to look out the curtain, but being in the dark room for so long the sun blinds me at first glance so whoever it is standing there has the anonymity of a bright-red glare looking more like a flame than a person. I look through the peephole but my vision does not improve. I didn’t think to sheepishly ask, “Who is it?” I simply open the door and standing there before me in all his evil, wicked glory, so on and forth, is the Devil himself. I put the gun away. It would be utterly useless.

            It is worth mentioning at this juncture before explaining the presence of the Devil at my hotel door that death doesn’t end one’s existence on Earth as it had not so many years ago. Many people live after death but there is no logic or reason to who will, or who will not. Zombieism has been estimated to affect 5% of the dead population but that number is just thrown out there, no one really knows. The educated ones always like to have numbers to justify their existence, to set them apart from the non-intellectuals. It changed the complexion of funerals completely and gave people hope that although they buried their loved ones, there is always that chance that their loved ones would come back. And not as a bear, a bird, or a willow tree, like in theories of reincarnation, but as an actual person! Though the chances of it happening were on par with winning the super lottery, it couldn’t be diminished in grieving minds. Old zombie movies depicted zombies as soulless, lethargic, groaning, cannibals with dead peeling skin and black eyes, hell-bent on destroying humans, but the truth is they are not much different than they were when they left (Hollywood stereotypes turned out to be terribly inaccurate in regards to aliens, too). Instead of being living dead, drooling cadavers, incapable of intelligible conversations or interpersonal relationships, they were quite savvy and complex after death. And curiously, they regenerate into their former selves in time, aging backwards, which was dubbed “The Benjamin Button Syndrome.” A mistaken belief was that if you had sex with a zombie it was like drinking from the fountain of youth. Among famous zombies, The Rolling Stones died in a plane accident in Brazil but walked away from the wreckage as zombies and will perform indefinitely. They will be as good as they were in 1970, sometime around 2070, if the aging backwards thing is accurate, but as of now they are still not nearly what they used to be. A curious fact is that you never know who will come back, or when. Elvis was dead for 50 years, but on the 50th anniversary of his death...the King reentered the metaphoric building.

A short list of other notable zombies who returned:

            Kurt Vonnegut

            Ray Charles

            John Wayne

            Albert Einstein

            Bela Lugosi

            John Candy

            Marilyn Monroe

            Harpo Marx

Adolf Hitler

Cleopatra

John Adams

Saddam Hussein

Zombies are often treated unfavorably; people question their worthiness, thinking “of all the dead people in the world, these are the ones who get to come back?” It’s human nature to be so cynical.  Once they were celebrated in parades like astronauts, but anymore they are shunned and resented, especially the commoners. Harpo Marx was particularly ridiculed when he tried to make it back into show business. No one wanted him. “Where’s Groucho?” they would say bitterly and the poor dope would make that abysmal face and toot his sad horn. But Tattoo, the little fellow who called the plane in Fantasy Island, got work on a game show called Tattooed! where convicts were killed to entertain a ravenous public. Not surprisingly, the show was produced by Heathcliff Bernard. Tattoo, flanked by four beautiful women, was the host, the talent, and the executioner, which people thought was hilarious. Lucky audience members would choose the manner of death and Tattoo would excitably kill them in whichever way they chose. Of course there was a game element to the show. The convicts would have an opportunity to battle Tattoo in games of skill (which heavily favored a little person but made for great comedy). For instance, they sometimes jousted on miniature ponies, had ostrich or tricycle races, or were human cannonballs shot for distance. On the rare occasion that the convict beat tattoo, Tattoo was kicked in the balls, the audience would wet themselves laughing, and the convict would go free.

Albert Einstein doesn’t do much these days besides garden and give TV interviews about the old days. Ray Charles sings and plays piano still, and it is thought that he didn’t even realize he had died. John Candy went on a zombie diet and hasn’t been as funny since losing 150 pounds, or since joining Saturday Night Live. Bela Lugosi is a smash doing beer commercials and on Halloween and doesn’t take off the vampire suit or makeup. Kurt Vonnegut is writing many more novels with way too much material to work with. Saddam Hussein owns a gas station in Detroit. Marilyn can’t get a role due to being typecast as dead. But with the lack of women and with her status as having the most sought-after lady part of all time she gets plenty of attention which is all she ever wanted in the first place. In five or six years, she will be again in her heyday and maybe, she hopes, people will forget she was dead.

More interestingly, John Adams vied to be the first zombie President of the United States, but was thwarted by current President Jimbo Templeton, who, after losing to Adams, challenged the constitutionality of a legally dead president. Even though Adams won the election he was ruled ineligible to serve by the Supreme Court, so the runner-up, Templeton, took the presidency. Adams was dogged by calls for Jefferson and could not answer why he was brought back and Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin remain worm-food. He took a job teaching history at some university where only Richey Riches (mostly from China) can afford to go. Ivy League, they call it. It is one of the few universities that didn’t close up the same year Betty Brown and I met at a train station at the defunct Dartmouth and had a few pitchers of beer. Cleopatra is somewhere in Egypt beguiling men and Adolf Hitler is on trial in Jerusalem as I speak for crimes against humanity, of course, indicted for roughly six million murders.

So the Devil stands there in the bright daylight not saying a word. He looks at me and smiles. “Blatz, old boy! How are you?”

I smile. Of course, at the time I didn’t know him. But it is hard not to guess who he is, since he is in true form and looks like a William Blake painting. He is exceptionally tall with red-naked skin drawn taut over an assembly of protuberant bones. He doesn’t have a noticeable penis but I am sure it retracts or something, or he can flick his nasty charred fingers with the long black serrated nails and it would quickly appear. He has no tail, cape, or pitchfork as he does in storybooks. He looks in great shape, extremely thin and ripped with muscles and his tallness is only diminished by an obvious hunch, a crooked back with small seared black wings protruding from his shoulder blades. All of his features are long and gruesome, beaten, charred, worn, slashed and repulsive. Not one part of him would fail to inspire some sort of fear or nausea. He has short whiskey-colored horns and a long chin with scraggly blood-red facial hair. His entire body is pierced with metal wires and studs. Immediately, I thought I was dreaming. But my dreams are never so fantastic. “May I come in?” Curiously, he waits.
           
            “Sure. Why not?”

“I’m never invited,” he says entering the room. I get a chill when he crosses the threshold. I felt nauseas and eerie. He smells like charred flesh, burnt fish, wet dog and ash.

“I have no qualms.”

“You should.”

He looks like an overgrown trick-or-treater, a pervert, a thief and a heroin junkie all in one vile body. He bends over to get through the door and looks around when he is inside like I imagine bacteria might inside of a new body. “Nice place you have here, Blatz,” followed by a grunt and a groan. Everything he says or does is followed by a grunt and a groan. He is lying through his saw-toothed smile. His beady-black eyes and face look disgusted by the room, yet aroused like a child-molester in a preschool. He hates green. He hates avocados. Or maybe his face just looks like that all the time.

“It isn’t mine. It’s a hotel room,” I defend myself from his presumptions.

He smiles at me, runs his finger along the edge of the dresser and licks it slowly, the dust, the ashes and stickiness of God knows what. A million universes die inside his mouth. I believe I can hear his finger sizzle like a hot pan dropped in a sink of cold water. Then he looks at me, down a long skinny crooked nose, cross-eyed, even. “Of course. You live in O-hi-o. Oh, I’ve been there.” He talks in a bizarre high-pitched accent and is looking at a terrible print on the wall—a wintry landscape with a dilapidated barn, a wood fence and snow-covered evergreens. “To your house on Brewery Street. When your wife was being fucked by the mailman as completely as anyone can be fucked. I was there again when you lay in that bathtub wanting to slash your wrists wide-open after you buried her. Ohhhhhhh, how cute it is that you put a crucifix on her grave...what a moment that stirred,” he slithered slowly.

I stood there silently. I don’t know if this is what happens when people die. Is this the ceremony of death? He goes in the bathroom, leaves the door open. I hear the toilet-seat drop and his ligaments stretch as he sits. I can hear his toenails curl and scratch the tile-floor. More grunting and groaning. He continues to talk while he using it; there are echoes of excretion like a goat screaming in a cave. “You don’t plan to go through with this race do you, now, Blatz?” he calls from his throne.  “A race like this, Death Race 6-6-6, cannot end up...”

I didn’t waste any time. As interesting as it might have been to talk to the Devil, to learn more about the miserable bastard, I have a race to win and nothing good will come of me waiting for him to finish shitting to talk to me. What would we do? Have a drink? Watch TV? Take a walk? I sneak out the door, rip the canvas tarp off Ruby, get in, rev her up, and spinout throwing gravel back towards the hotel. I hear the window shatter. And looking back in my rearview I see the Devil leaning out of the hotel room door with a roll of toilet paper in his claw-like hand.