Cocktopus Lives!
The first time The Creature came for you, you were laying on the couch thinking about Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, your dick sticking out of your checker patterned pajama shorts, beating off in the dark; not the Dirk Benedict version of the popular Sci Fi character, the more recent one who recently went topless in the also most-recent version of Riddick, and though everything sounds recent when it’s said like this everything is except for the actual act of the beating off.
The first time The Creature came for you, that was months ago. But you remember. It was September, the time of the month in which the moon outside protrudes like a vast yellow asshole but you’re inside, aren’t you, jerking off to the femininely updated version of Starbuck and after a good five minutes of that you become disoriented, because that’s what you do—and your mind wanders—and before you can do anything about it Starbuck isn’t just blowing you, she’s also drinking coffee from a cardboard cup with the word Starbucks printed on its side, and you find this distracting and ask her to get rid of it and because this is your fantasy she doesn’t belittle you, she agrees to lose the coffee but she doesn’t just sit it down on the floor like you were thinking she would, she reaches behind her and hands it to Dirk Benedict and you’re all “Where the hell’d he come from?” before lady Starbuck suggests you shut the Frak up and cups your fantasy balls and you decide to just go with it.
You muddle through.
But before you can finish you hear sounds like worn burlap tearing and if the way your heart broke permanently when she’d said she was leaving had been a smell that’s what it smelled like now and though the room’s dark and your mind’s blurred and your arm’s tired and the parade of blood smokes cigarettes in your penis pacing back and forth, you’re suddenly gorged with the sensation that you’re not alone, because you’re not.
Something is looming on the other side of your feet at the foot of the couch and before you can put your own dick down or grab a headlamp or stand up and run screaming for help it’s upon you. Your eyes are no longer relevant because it’s dark but you don’t need eyes to know that the space between you and your own safety has been obliterated. There’s the weight pinning your legs down and the smell that smells like her leaving and the sound of claws jangling keys like they’ve just opened their own knife store and The Creature is giggling. Its breath has mass.
Quote: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (End Quote:) and it hits that you’ll never be stronger because this lump-fucked monster’s going to end you and as the thing in the dark grabs your arm and half a dozen sharp things break skin your penis falls out of your hand and you scream like a butchered Theremin and as fast as the goddamn nightmare seemed to pop out of nowhere a fucking eternity ago it just as quickly pops back out again and you find yourself shaking and at half mast and alone.
You go to work the next day and during the September Birthdays Potluck you tell several people eating cake what’s happened. You leave out the part where you were masturbating, of course, but everything else you blurt out, you tell them the rest and they don’t believe you, maybe because you didn’t bring a dish to pass, so you show them the long gashes on your upper arm and they either blame Obamacare or suggest that you cut yourself shaving.
You’re embarrassed that some of them have guessed correctly that you do indeed on special occasions shave your arms so you drop it and spend the rest of the potluck not laughing at jokes about new filing systems while pretending to eat their goddamn cake.
The days that follow curve into nights shaped like haunted zoos.
The second time The Creature came for you, you were locked securely in a bathroom stall at Target masturbating above a recently cleaned toilet seat. You’d only gone in to pee but you were bored and the place was empty and some days there’s just something about boobs in red shirts so you entered the stall like a crumbling society’s modern day version of Don Juan or Don Quixote and went to work. When the reality of what you’re doing arrives you push it back because sure jerking off in an empty Target bathroom may be a tad bit desperate and pathetic and perhaps even creepy, but at least its Target, that is to say at least you’re not jerking off in an empty public bathroom at Walmart or something like that–because that would really be hitting bottom. The fact that this is Target and not Walmart means that you haven’t lost all hope completely. You haven’t hit bottom yet. There’s still plenty of down space in which for you to fall.
And while you’re thinking this The Creature comes at you, breaking through the locked door of the stall like a crazed peeping tom version of the Kool-Aid man and you get a good look at it this time; several feet tall, somewhat humanoid in shape but with ears covering around 75% of it facial area and an enormous mouth crammed with multiple rows of shark teeth where its belly button should be–its body somehow covered with thick fur and reptile-like scales at the same time. It’s got octopus tentacles instead of ass cheeks and an Infinity sign for a dick. And for some evolutionary reason the goddamn thing’s bright orange and in a repeat performance of your first encounter with the thing you scream, drop your penis, and The Creature scratches you on the arm and runs off.
The fact that the creature has attacked you twice now while you were masturbating and retreated back into its own Hellworld at the precise moment that you cease masturbating does not occur to you yet. It’s not until the third encounter that you start to put it together that these attacks are for some reason connected with the self stimulation of your dick.
You’re in the shower and testy because the world is cruel and you haven’t had sex with a woman since she left over a year ago and you haven’t successfully pleasured yourself in awhile because The Creature keeps interrupting—and it’s here that you begin to put it together, nebulously at best because a couple seconds after thinking this you start thinking about a woman’s downhill skiing competition you once watched on TV and then you’re off again, alone in the shower with her name tattooed on your left arm jerking off.
Time moves in quick uneasily definable pieces and before Lindsey Vonn hits the Corduroy you hear the sounds of something tearing the piss across your kitchen and your first thought is ‘Who let John Goodman in?’ but then you perk up and realize John Goodman doesn’t know you and even if he did there’s nobody around to open the door for him and that’s when you get it, that The Creature’s returned to murder you while you masturbate and as you listen to the sounds of something horrible hobbling down your hallway it pops like someone’s just hit you upside the head with Colombo and you get it, as the enormous orange shape of the goddamn thing shoulder rapes your bathroom doorframe. The Creature only shows up when you’re jerking off—and it always leaves when you stop touching yourself—so just before the fucking nightmare rips the heart out of your sliding glass shower door you stop touching yourself, and just like that the beast stops where its feet are, breathing heavily. It doesn’t immediately retreat like it usually does, but it doesn’t advance either. It just sort of stands there, staring, with a face full of ears, as if waiting to see what you’ll do.
Maybe it’s the hot water or the fact that everything has always felt hopeless or your current proximity to soap; whatever it is you don’t completely crumble this time and to the voraciously confused outsider it may even appear like you’re standing your ground.
As The Creature abides there grunting like a sentimental Scooby Doo attempting to mount and bone hump an outstandingly pissed off pterodactyl you take it upon yourself to test things. After scanning the shower you quickly rope around your right fist a somewhat formidably sized piece of luffa, the closest thing you can find to a weapon, and with your left hand you enunciate, fingers extending, until the middle one which you still use occasionally to symbolize your desire for specific members of the human race to go-fuck-themselves and the one next to it that once wore the ring tentatively brush against your somewhat hard shaft.
Upon witnessing this the huffing beast flies into a rage! Claws rise. Its belly button leveled mouth howls, and before you can yank your hand away the shower door’s been pulled from its own track and hurled against the toilet where it lies leaked into a thousand pieces. You break hand contact with your penis as the door breaks and The Creature stands, set to pause once again, with its upper body leaned into the shower and it hits you like bad porn that you are only, as you stand there, the mere width of one or perhaps two cracked out hookers away from a horribly clunky death.
You also realize that with the monster sort of crouching like it is with its mouth located at a freaky belly button type level, that this puts its entire ocean’s worth of sharp teeth dangerously at the same level as your own penis. And then it also occurs to you that perhaps this is not just a weird coincidence. And then you just stand there for a while hands spread wide and locked as far away from your own wiener as you can get them, with The Creature breathing hot puss against the side of your face as if, I don’t know, daring you to wank off.
But you don’t wank, so eventually The Creature fucks off again, leaving you now at least with a silver bulletproof defense on how to avoid being devoured by the goddamn thing in the future. It’s simple. Just: don’t masturbate. I mean, who needs it? She’s been gone for at least a year. You should be over that by now. You shouldn’t be moping around beating off to new Wendy’s commercials or terrible feel good movies like The Blind Side. You hate value meal chili almost as much as you hate Sandra Bullock. You’re better than that. You’re a grown man now. You shouldn’t be touching yourself all the time like an eight year old boy in 1979 recently exposed to the existence of The Dukes Of Hazzard’s Catherine Bach. You should be out dating. Find a nice lady to settle down with. Not only will you not be alone anymore, you won’t need to touch your own penis as such. You can do sex stuff with your new lady. Yes, you’ve convinced yourself that there’ll never be a new lady, but surely you’ve come to realize by now that being alone sucks. Surely your post-being-left-by-her fear of intimacy has been trumped by your fear of being torn to pieces by a Creature whose specific attack formation puts its enormous mouth full of teeth at the exact same level of your cock.
On the bright side, maybe this beast is doing you a favor, that is to say you’re stubborn and a horrible self-starter and if you continue on in the manner in which you’ve chosen to continue you’ll end up fulfilling the Donnie Darko prophesy which states that everyone dies alone. So, maybe this is the proverbial kick in the front of the pants that’s needed. You’ve been presented with a choice. You can either face your fears of becoming involved in another relationship and become involved in another relationship, thus dodging the tangent bunny, or you can remain alone while living a hollow, ejaculation-less life and go mad.
So what’s it going to be?
Several Months Later
You are the worst adult date person ever. You’re introverted and useless and your pick up lines sound like late night TV ads for incontinence, because you were never good at this sort of thing or you’re heart just isn’t in it; who knows? What is known is that you’re still hung up on things probably so you’ve given up on finding someone and you haven’t seen The Creature since that one night long ago in your bathroom because that was the last time you’ve touched your own dick. What’s also known is that, as hopelessly predicted because of all this, you’ve grown abundantly insane.
And in the time between then and now you’ve also learned The Creature’s real name, and you whisper it now, while standing disrobed outside on a borrowed balcony; after having decided to end it at the ending because that’s where endings belong if they belong anywhere and it seems fitting after all because its endings that drove you here in the first place, for The Creature feeds exclusively on the lonely and the doomishly depressed and its name isn’t Creature, it’s Cocktopus—and you call it by name now as you stand there beneath the moon which is still an asshole, yanking your penis for the final last time while thinking about this one moment that died long ago when she was on top of you and you were on acid and the walls smelled like a motel room because you were fucking in an old motel. As her hair melts into guitar strings, and then a Lee Majors song that he once sang to the Bionic Woman on The Six Million Dollar Man, and then back into hair again you hear the Cocktopus scream, and then it’s standing right in front of you smiling like a sick fuck who’s just won a cursed bet, and then you say something so profound and goddamn sad that I can’t believe I can’t remember it, I really should’ve written it down at the time.
Oh well.
Rain purples. Doves cry. And then Cocktopus rips your fucking head off, and you bleed all over the balcony, as Love returns home humming Prince tunes after a long evening spent dildo shopping and the moon shits goodnight for the crowd….
(written for the Fbomb, Mercury Café/Denver CO)
Multiverse Johnson 