Give Death A Chance (6 page)

I stopped singing and whispered, “Listen, you have to help me. I only have a few seconds before they’ll come for me. I’ve been kidnapped by three Zombies and a Ninja, and I need to escape, then get somebody to stop them before they take over the world!”

As the growing crowd rumbled some unintelligible rumbly stuff, the bearded man said, “Listen, boy, the only thing ah hate worse than a Jew wearing some limey clothes is a Zombie.” He pulled a giant shotgun from his pants—no clue how he fit a shotgun in his pants, but that was neither the time nor the place to ask—then said, “Where them undead bastards at?”

I turned around to point to the van, and found myself face to face with George Harrison. Quietly, he said, “I don’t know about the South, mate. They’re a bit tetchy about the race situation, it seems.” Nodding at the bearded man, he said, “This one could use a mantra. Or maybe a tab of brown. Or maybe a Thai stick. Or maybe a foot up his ass.” And then George shoved the bearded man to the sidewalk, removed the man’s foot from his leg, and shoved it up his ass. With his hemoglobin fountaining all over the street, the man squealed like a pig for two-ish minutes before bleeding out. Unsurprisingly, the crowd dispersed. Quickly.

As I wiped the blood from my chin, George draped his arm over my shoulders and said, “We were just taking the piss, mate. We wouldn’t have let the rednecks have at you. At least
I
wouldn’t have. John, he’s a different story.”

“You ain’t just whistling
Dixie
.”

“Whistling what?”

“Forget it.”

“You mortals say the most naff shite. I should Liverpool Process you just so we could have a proper conversation.” He looked at the dead cracker and said, “But who has time for that kind of bullocks when there are meals to be eaten.” He let out a deafening Zombie moan and went to town on the bearded racist until all that was left on the sidewalk was a small puddle of blood, a spleen, a pancreas, and a kidney.

JULY 10, 2009

It was the middle of the night when Lennon shook me awake. (I assumed was the middle of the night, but, if you’ll recall, I don’t have a watch or an iPhone, thus I never have a true sense of time.) Without preamble or apology, John said, “So tell me about this Madonna cunt, then.”

Once I regained some semblance of my faculties, I said, “John, she’s been in the public’s consciousness since, like, 1981. You can’t tell me that you’re so wrapped up in your weird Zombie shit that you don’t know about Madonna.”

“I’ve been busy,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just shut your gob, and tell me what the cunt is about.”

“How can I tell you what the cunt is about if my gob is shut.” He gave me the look that was generally a precursor to a beating, so I sat up and said, “Okay, remember when we were talking about Lady Gaga a few weeks ago?”

“Right, that one,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah. That one. Basically Gaga is a Madonna wannabe.”

“So this Madonna cunt bares her bristols to sell records?”

“Well, yes and no. When she shows her, um, bristols, she generally puts some thought behind it.”

John asked, “How the fook do you put thought behind something like that? You take off your top, and there they are, bristols for all.”

“She likes to give her bristols some context. There’s sometimes choreography involved. And costumes. And periodically, a song that she actually sings. It’s part porn and part performance art.”

“What the fook is performance art?” John asked.

Under my breath, I mumbled, “The crap that Yoko does.”

John asked, “What?”

“I said, it’s utilizing various types of media to express your vision. It can be a canvas, or your voice, or electronics, or, in Madonna’s case, her bristols. But she keeps her bristols under wraps these days. She does a lot of yoga now.”

John again rolled his eyes. “Georgie tried to get me into that yoga shite. It was smashing until my nose fell off during one of those fookin’
kapotasanas
.” He paused. “Just so you know, we’re on our way to New York to see this Madonna cunt. I think she can teach us something.”

“About what, exactly?” I asked. They hadn’t learned anything from Timberlake, and I suspected the same would be true with the Material Girl.

“Dunno,” he shrugged. Then he clapped me on the shoulder—not hard enough to break my collarbone, for a change—pointed at my crotch, and said, “Maybe we’ll get her to play with your little guy down there.”

“I appreciate that, but I’ll take a pass.” Since Lennon and I were sharing
a moment
—and it seemed like beating the crap out of me wasn’t in the front of his mind—I figured now was as good a time as any to ask him something I’d been curious about since they snatched me up last month: “John, if you want to rule the United States, why don’t you just hypnotize your way into the White House and be done with it?” Liverpool Zombies had scary-good mind control powers—if you’ve seen footage of the hypnosis-induced riots from the Beatles Shea Stadium concert in 1965 (and who hasn’t?), you’re well aware of that fact. “It would save a lot of time and effort,” I added.

John looked away from me, then said, “You researched me. You know I’ll never use hypnosis as a means to carry out a mission.” That was true. It was common knowledge that when it came to landing a manager, or getting a record deal, or launching a confused and confusing record label doomed to failure, the Beatles relied on their talent and smarts and talent rather than their paranormal powers. But those particular examples were music- and career-related, whereas taking over the country was a power play, and when it came to power plays from the Fab Four, nothing was off the table. Look at what happened in the Philippines. Or in Montreal. Or in London. Or in Hell. Point being, something seemed fishy.

I said, “John, you and Paul have been at each other’s throats since Chicago, George is getting crankier…”

“If that’s possible,” John interrupted.

“Right, if that’s possible. And Ringo’s so sick of you guys that he’s about to jump ship.”

“Rings always threatens to jump ship when he gets sick of us. I’ll just give him some flowers, and he’ll be fine.”

“Fine, but even you would admit that things in the van aren’t exactly hunky-dory. So let’s blow off New York and go to Washington, bum rush the Oval Office, and put an end to this madness.” I honestly didn’t think there was any way they could possibly get a crack at Obama, as the White House has USZG’s coming out of its butthole. But John didn’t need to know that.

Still avoiding eye contact, John said, “Bad fookin’ idea, Scribe. We’re going to New York. We’re sticking with the plan.”

“I still don’t know what the plan is, exactly,” I said.

“And you never will. Now shut the fook up go the fook back to sleep.”

As he made his way to the front of the van, something dawned on me: “Hey, John,” I asked, “can you guys still hypnotize people?”

Without turning around, he said, “Piss off.”

“You can’t, can you? That’s why you haven’t hypnotized me. That’s why you had to decapitate Justin Timberlake, instead of taking over his big-ass brain. Man, no wonder Paul’s so worried about how many records you can sell. It’s all about the music now…. Not to mention he has
Back to the Egg
under his belt.”

John grabbed me by my collar, pulled my face right up against his, and whispered, “First of all,
Back to the Egg
wasn’t
that
bad—it was a fook of a lot better than that Traveling Wilburys shite—and second of all, you keep our little chat here quiet, Scribe. If you mention anything about this conversation to anybody—and when I say
anybody
, that includes my fookin’ bandmates—I’ll rip off your plonker, and let you bleed to death on the side of the road without doing you the honor of Zombifying you. It’ll be simple for us to find some other hack writer to write the end of this story. Got it?” He shoved me to the floor and navigated his way to the front passenger seat.

I croaked, “I got it, John. I got it.”

JULY 12, 2009

Madonna was waiting for us.

Actually, Madonna wasn’t waiting for us, but rather her assistant’s assistant’s assistant, who made us sit for 58 minutes outside his office before we got to the assistant’s assistant, who made us wait for 72 minutes outside her office before we got to the assistant, who made us wait for 95 minutes outside her office, at which point we were finally granted an audience with the woman herself. How the Beatles managed to restrain themselves from killing any of Madonna’s myriad lackeys is beyond me.

After Assistant #3 ushered us into a palatial office—expensive furniture, an Oriental rug I was scared to walk on, what was undoubtedly an original Picasso—Madonna, who was parked behind a desk that was bigger than my apartment, gave me the hairy eyeball and said, “You. Yeah, you. With the crappy tattoos. You’re not John, or Paul, or George, or Ringo, and I seriously doubt you’re Sir George Martin.” She stood up and snarled, “So who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you doing here?” I was momentarily struck dumb, as she was wearing only a small strip of fabric around her chest, and a smaller strip around her hoo-hah. “Hey, you! Up here. I have eyes,” she said, noticing that my pupils were glued to her astoundingly perky breasts. Then she repeated, “So who the fuck are you, and what the fuck are you doing here?”

Paul said, “He’s Alan, y’know. He’s our Boswell, y’know. He’s, erm, telling our story, y’know.”

“And if he wants to look at your bristols,” Ringo said, “let him look at your bristols. He’s had a tough go of it.”

Madonna shook her head. “Okay, fine. I don’t have time to argue, so have a good gander at my tits, Boswell. But before we continue this discussion, you’re all signing an NDA. Especially Writer Boy here. I don’t like the looks of him.”

Ringo said, “Well, apparently he likes the looks of you.”

Madonna sighed, pulled a plain white t-shirt that probably cost more than I made in the last four years combined from her desk drawer, threw it on, then ordered her assistant to bring us a non-disclosure agreement, which I skimmed. The basic gist of it was if I wrote a single word about this meeting, Madonna could sue my ass into tomorrow. I signed the damn thing, which means if this little journal gets published, and I manage to survive the Poppermost Over America tour, Ms. Ciccone and I will meet again, this time in court…because I’m writing down every goddamn word I can goddamn well remember from the goddamn meeting: