Butch Flabbacini and Ratso Haggisi.

Enter Night, Exit Light.

So there I was, a young man… body glued to a sad sagging ragged couch, eyes glued to the garbage chute, which was currently feeding me my daily Simpson-shaped dose.

I had fled the terrors of the Bat Cave and back to my other place with friends where I lived under the house, as detailed in the story “Galaxy of Delights”

I was 18 and had settled into a good NZ demolition workers routine.

I was in my numb survival rut.

Get up early, work all day, often in the rain. Come home in agony and covered in filth.

Shower. Sit on couch, and kill all the pain with a TV and weed combo.

By my side was my mate joining me in numb solidarity after a hard day of working in a plant warehouse. All my friends had bullshit jobs. It seems most 18-year-olds don’t have bullshit jobs anymore, but back in my day if you teamed up with a few of your mates and all got bullshit jobs like warehouse mong, landscaping spaz, or gas station dork you could all live in a rundown flat and earn enough to party yourself half to death on the weekends, as long as you lived very cheaply and never bought anything besides food, booze drugs and bus tickets.

There was a knock on the door. Curiosity and laziness getting the better of my paranoia I yelled “Come in”.

In snuffling and snorting, shuffled a mountain of what I decided was a girl.
She was made huger by the gigantic gangster-type puff jacket she was wearing. The type of jacket that makes the person look as if they should be inflated, branded with some kind of beer commercial, and floated above a football stadium.

She had a huge moon-like yellowy waxen face, somewhere in the center of which hid two piggy little eyes (glistening with malice of course) a snout, and a sour piggy mouth. She possessed a sort of hunchness and an air of inbreeding. Stubby little sausage fingers protruded from the arms of the blimp jacket and dirty little trotters poked out of what could have been baggy gangster pants to someone without barrel legs.

My friends, always seeking to give new and exciting names to people, later dubbed her Butch Flabbacini.

Shuffling in behind her was a specter… a wraith…a wisp… another thing that I decided was a girl also.

This one wore a holey Metallica t-shirt that would have once been a cool black and had now faded to a dismal dishcloth gray, the picture and lettering on the shirt had come away and now could only be discerned with the use of the most diligent connect the dots type imagination.

It hung upon her skinny gray frame like a funeral shroud. She was so skeletal that she seemed to be made up of coat hanger wire. Tiny and pointy braless tits like tiny sharpened witches’ hats poked from her shirt. She wore a pair of rancid black jeans that she probably stole from a Barbie and on her head she had a black beanie that was (I am sure) disguising that her hair was coming away in patches.

Her face was so narrow and skull-like, that you had to look at it from side on to get a good view. It was pocked with craters and newly forming pustules and cankers, a moldering cold sore started at the corner of her mouth and seemed to be threatening to engulf her entire head.

Her whole demeanor was permeated with rattyness from her yellow ratty teeth to her twisted ratty claws. A festa face whose only future prospects were either emaciated druggie or Hideous witchy scarer of innocent folk who are just trying to get along in life and don’t need such shocks.

I was to find that she was well on her way in both these careers.
All you would have to do would be put a couple of bolts on her neck and the villagers would be after her with torches and pitchforks.

She was dubbed Ratso Haggisi.

They shubbled over to me and in the pained conversation that followed, I deduced these facts.
1.  They wanted drugs.
2.  They had no money.
3.  They were friends of Timo the psychotic Samoan alcoholic baker and professional boxer from next door and he had sent them over here to get drugs from me.
4.  The huge one was 18.
5.  The waif was 16.
6.  The waif claimed to drink a forty-ounce of Jack Daniels a night (which looking at her condition was the only nutrition she got).
7.  The huge one wouldn’t stop seeping out disgusting farts and trying to secretly wave them away with her hand. The farts were so deeply from the graveyard of the long gone and were so festering that I was sure I was going to spew and actually felt the rise, the eyes water, and the strange prespew saliva at the back of the throat being produced.
8.  Their personalities were so vile and the perverted statements they made were so profound, that all my friends had fled to their rooms on hearing a few sentences from these handmaidens of pestilence. And to this day I have blocked much of the evil and pained conversation from my conscious recall, pushing it back and away into a dark dungeon-like corner of my mind where even my other bad memories fear to go. But in a short time, they had somehow fit the topics of rape, incest, and serious personal crimes into each topic of conversation. Never had I ever encountered such a gross scene and I was a pretty rough individual.
9.  They wanted drugs.
10.  They had no money.

Pure survival instinct kicked in and I suddenly said that I was very tired and had to go to bed because I usually go to bed at 7 pm because I work so hard and must get up at 4 am.

I pushed them out the door and fled downstairs to my room which was a large hollowed-out carpet-lined cave under the house. I slammed the door and jumped into my damp moldy-smelling but always-warm bed, to cower under the covers.

The whole experience of being subjected to those two had left me a husk. A drained shivering sick feeling ruin. This is where the legends of human vampires come from.

My sense of light and love in the world, a feeling that I tenderly and tentatively fostered over time, (because the soil of a man’s heart is stony, but he grows what he can… and he tends it) had been cruelly snuffed and my mind had experienced such terror through being in the presence of these malicious beings for long enough for my sanity to be broken down into shards so tiny that the bits would have easily passed through the eye of a needle.

Well maybe not that bad …but I knew I didn’t want to ever see them again.

I hid in the darkness for a while, then I heard it…the approach of cloven hooves followed by the clacking of bony reaper feet.
There was a knock on my door.
In reply, I snored a terror-filled snore.
They opened the door and came in anyway.
I felt their approach like a wave of poisonous swill.

Some kind of evil auric field?
A stubby hand pudged me “awake”.
“Hey, we were thinking…” a skinny voice cackled.
What followed was indescribable and I will not bring the conversation to memory lest I run shrieking from this world, yet I will tell you dear reader that the goal of the negotiations they embarked on was for them to establish some sort of “sex for dope deal” with me. At the start they were offering very little sex for lots of dope and at the end they were offering lots of free sex if we shared a thin joint.

My racing heart, my bile rising terror and my freezing sweat got the better of my miserliness and I gave them a small hand full of weed for them to promise to “Never ever under any circumstances come back to me ever again forever… that’s ever…I said ever.
I mean ever.

They left…. I was only to see Butch Flabbacini one more time a few weeks later when I possibly saved her life. A story to be told next.

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