Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (17 page)

Moving anywhere involved performing the constrained hobble of the man searching for a fresh roll of toilet paper with his pants around his ankles. I had almost no leg movement, so I couldn’t escape from the likes of Sprinkles and Tanooki no matter how badly I wanted my freedom. If I moved any faster than a very slow walk, I felt as if I would fall at any moment, a terrifying prospect considering the limited range of movement I had in my arms and legs.

And then there was Peter Two-Tails. He was a ridiculous white rabbit fursuiter with an oversized head and red blushing circles painted onto the fur of his cheeks. He had, get this, two-tails. I know, didn’t see that one coming, did you?

Peter was not as grabby as Sprinkles or Tanooki, but he stood very close when he talked and he refused to back away. On the plus side, this meant I was at least able to hear him. On the minus side, I was able to hear him.

He pressed in close and I could see the moving shadows of his face behind the dark mesh of the vision screen on his suit’s neck.

“What’s your name?” Peter asked.

His breathless words were redolent with the caked-molar stench of Cool Ranch Dorito and chocolate milk.

“Otto,” I replied, slapping a tentacle tip on my name tag.

“Otto,” he repeated. “You like to party?”

“Having fun,” I answered, trying to move away a little.

“Good, good, man. Good. Wanna yiff?” he asked, a tuberculoid wheeze at the trailing end of the fricative.

“Not now, I’m feeling tired.” I dropped my stock response.

“Mmm,” he said, and rubbed a white paw up his bulbous torso. “If I take a little hop around the convention, come back, will you be ready then?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Just then, a family of three approached. The children were fat and wearing cat ears; the mother resembled one of the chirruping blobs from
The Herculoids,
but they were a welcome sight.

“Mmmmm,” Peter said, adding m’s and beginning to worry me. “I see, I see. Well, Peter Two-Tails will make two laps around and see you when he sees you.”

Peter attempted to make a shooter with the fingers of his paw, but the inarticulate mitten produced something that looked like a gang sign.

“Awww,” the woman said with apparent disappointment, “I wanted to get a picture of you two together.”

The product of my awkward day bumbling around the convention center was an invitation to an after-hours party at a suite in the Westin. Normally I would have been apprehensive about attending such an event, but the invitation was given by a very fetching girl in a cat suit that was more Catwoman from
Batman
than Paws from the Detroit Tigers.

“It would be purrrrrfect if you could make it,” she said, and winked her long lashes at me.

Don’t get the wrong idea; I’m a happily married man, but this woman tendering the invitation automatically made the party seem safer. After all, if a beautiful girl in a skintight cat suit was going to be there, didn’t that lower the odds of some implausible nightmare scenario?

Don’t answer that question just yet.

Some Implausible Nightmare Scenario

I never expected to make it through the writing of this book completely unscathed, but it wasn’t supposed to go down like it did. I figured being put in some psychedelic torture chamber by a fake researcher in Chicago and run off the road in Missouri was bad enough. What happened in Pittsburgh, well, that was just unfair.

Super God had another surprise up his all-encompassing sleeve.

I showed up at the party fashionably late and with a six-pack of Rolling Rock tucked into the awkwardly folded tip of my arm-tentacle. I desperately needed to interview some furries in a more personal setting. The convention center had been too bewildering and, I will admit, intimidating. Maybe a little alcohol and a more relaxed atmosphere would loosen up some tongues.

“Heyyyyyy!” a skinny guy with leopard face paint exclaimed as I walked in through the door.

The suite party was packed. They had opened the doors between adjoining rooms and it still seemed cramped and claustrophobic. It didn’t help that I could barely walk and when I sat down I had to either roll back up to my feet or be helped up by someone else. I also realized that I was one of the only ones wearing a full fursuit at the party. The other one I could see was Peter Two-Tails.

“What the fuck is up, nigger!?” he shouted, and gave me a giant hug.

People cheered at the sight and cheered more when he pretended to hump me.

“Get the fuck off!” I said, and shoved him roughly away.

Or that was the idea, but no one heard me over the cheering, and a “rough shove” from inside a squid suit looked suspiciously like I was trying to hump back. This produced even more cheering. When it eventually died down, I collapsed awkwardly into one of the hotel chairs, sweating and panting inside the suit and already regretting showing up at the party.

The pretty girl who had lured me to the party showed with a cool drink at my moment of greatest weakness. She was wearing an even more revealing costume than her skintight cat suit. This one had a diamond cut in the stretchy fabric just below her neck and I could see two buckets full of cleavage. She swished her tail and showed off her butt to everyone as she handed me the drink.

The cheering became so loud at the sight of her shaking booty that one of my spy gear microphones squealed with feedback. By the time I yanked my arm out of the tentacle and was able to pull the earpiece out, I was completely deaf in my left ear.

I opened the mouth slot on my costume and gulped the sweet alcoholic beverage through a straw. It tasted like a whiskey sour.

Cat girl jumped up on one of the dressers in the suite and began to dance like a stripper, swaying her hips and running her hands up and down her shapely body. People were cheering and clapping. I was pouring sweat inside the furnace of my suit, drinking the whiskey as quickly as possible to keep from overheating. My ear was ringing.

Colors began to run together. Faces and bodies stretched and distorting like animals in a Salvador Dali painting. I leaned forward in the chair; cat girl seemed to vibrate.

Peter Two-Tails loomed out of the crowd, more bulbous than ever; his rabbit head was a nightmare mask with grinning buckteeth.

“I’m hallucinating,” I said, but no one seemed to hear me.

“My hands are snakes,” I thought I heard Peter Two-Tails say, and when my gooey eyes looked over, his hands were bundles of snakes.

I looked down through the grid at my own body and I could see I was made up of white worms as thick as elephant trunks. The plush suckers on each limb became tiny mouths snapping open and closed.

My mind was just working well enough for me to realize that I was drugged. The whiskey slipped from my fingers and the glass bounced on the carpet.

“Fuck,” was the last thing I said as I slumped forward out of the chair.

When I woke up I was moving. Shaking from side to side. There was a rumble. My whole body ached and I was nearly naked. My head felt like someone had shit fire into my ear and deafened me in the process. My temples were throbbing with pain.

The movement stopped and my head collided with a hard surface. There were voices. Clicks like latches being unlocked. What was happening?

Light exploded around me. The entire wall seemed to fall away and I tumbled through it, falling and landing on another hard surface. Heavy objects landed around and on top of me.

“What the fuck?” The question was asked by a shadow looming over me. A voice I recognized.

“There’s shit written all over him,” said another voice.

“Owned at Anthrocon 2008,” said the first person. “Something Awful hatemongers will pay.”

My eyes began to adjust to the light.

“Yo,” said a third voice. “They want…what the hell? Is that a dick drawn on that dude?”

“Yeah, I think he’s one of those furries from the hotel.”

“What’s he doing in our luggage compartment?” asked the newcomer.

My eyes finally adjusted. My embarrassment was complete as a small uniformed crowd gathered around my nearly naked, graffiti-covered body.

And that was how I briefly met the equipment managers for the New York Yankees.

No fate but what we make.

 

—Sarah Connor

 

T
his is the story of how my journey writing this book and a little help from the Internet reunited me with the woman named Lindsay Dawn Riley. Sort of.

During the course of my lifetime I have met many fascinating, wonderful, and terrible people. No one quite manages to juggle all three qualities like Lindsay Dawn Riley. She is the mean, redneck, disaster of a human being who has haunted me for a full decade. I have written many articles about her, some more embellished than others, but I have always remained faithful to the woman and the story at its heart.

To get to that story I need to begin with the story of Todd. Todd Glenn. Like John Glenn, only Todd. Todd the Ron Paul supporter. He was my gateway to Lindsay.

I have known Todd Glenn since the weekend
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
opened in theaters.

I was thirteen years old and I wanted to see
Terminator 2
so badly that in the car on the way from Ohio to Georgia I read the novelization. I loved it! Now I know that the only form of literature lower than a movie novelization is a video game novelization, but at the time I gave the book high marks for the vivid descriptions of assault shotguns.

Our first day in Georgia, we visited one of the overcrowded tourist beaches and I swam in the ocean for nearly five hours. I realized something was wrong on the drive back to my family’s rental house. Hideous liquid-filled blisters began sprouting from my shoulders and back. My carelessness with sunscreen resulted in a biblical plague version of sunburn.

It was epic sunburn. Heroic sunburn. The sort of sunburn where doing anything hurts. Laying down? Hurts. Sitting? Hurts. Turning your head? Yeah, it hurts. Hurting itself somehow hurt.

After two days of suffering in the darkened rental house, we moved on to a family reunion in Tucson, Arizona. The reunion barbecue at my great uncle’s house happened to coincide with the release of
Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

At the barbecue two dozen or so relatives I never met before and have never met since were cavorting around a pool, playing volleyball, and generally having a good time. While they were doing this, I sat beneath an awning looking like the white devil from a Joseph Conrad story and feeling like a rasher of bacon degreasing in a paper towel.

The Arizona heat was bad enough, so bad that you had to run on asphalt or the rubber soles of your shoes would begin to melt, but add in the sunburn and I was basically paralyzed. It was the agony of dying without the sweet release of death.

I longed to be in a cool, dark theater watching the impossible things described in the novelization of
Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
A man made from liquid metal with knife hands! He grows extra arms to fly a helicopter and shoot guns at the same time! This was the sort of cinematic masterpiece that had to be seen on opening day, a film as epic as my sunburn.

Relief came from an unlikely source on that scorching July day. From my shaded position in one corner of the patio, isolated and suppurating sullenly, I caught a glimpse of someone lurking on the other side of the nearby fence.

A soft voice emerged from the shadows on the other side of the wooden fence and asked, “What happened to you?”

“Flamethrower mishap,” was my answer.

The nosey interloper turned out to be Todd Glenn. He was staying with his divorced father and had been told to “go outside and play.” Todd was a shy, frail kid a month or so younger than me. His mother lived with her new husband in California and sent Todd to stay with his father in Tucson during the summer.

He invited me over to his dad’s house to hang out in the air-conditioned darkness of the basement rec center and play Sega Genesis on the big screen TV. After two hours of Alien Storm and E-SWAT, we had exhausted all feeling in our thumbs.

Todd’s dad, who looked like an extra from the movie
Wall Street
with his slicked-back hair and suspenders, suggested we go see a movie and get pizza. I suggested
Terminator 2
and Todd literally gave me a high five.

Our trip for dinner and movie turned out to be just for me and Todd. His dad shoved cash into Todd’s hand and deposited us in the long line waiting to get tickets to see
Terminator
while he drove down the block for a massage. At the time I didn’t really think a whole lot about what his dad was doing for the more than two hours we were watching the movie. In hindsight it was probably pretty dire and Todd’s dad was one of the worst dads ever.

At least he might have been, except for the simple fact that he dropped us off to see
Terminator 2.
With me and Todd stuffing our faces full of candy and popcorn and witnessing one of the cinematic masterpieces of our lifetime in an air-conditioned theater it was hard to come to any other conclusion: Todd’s dad was the greatest man on earth.

After the movie, we sat out on the curb as afternoon faded into evening. Todd’s dad was very late, but we didn’t care. I was bonding with Todd, nearly giddy from watching
Terminator 2.
We were like two ecstatics discovering Christ together in the same faith-healing tent.

“The best part was the way the T-1000 shot his guns super fast like faster than a normal person!” Todd enthused.

“And he ran with his arms like this,” I said, and I ran down the sidewalk flailing my arms like an idiot.

When Todd’s dad arrived and took us out for pizza it was just icing on the Judgment Day cake.

“It was good?” he asked, and laughed when we cheered our approval.

The evening did not have a happy ending. When the car pulled up outside Todd’s house and I hauled my pizza-and candy-stuffed carcass from the backseat, I was greeted by the particular rage of a mom who has spent most of the day searching for you.

Meeting Todd and seeing
Terminator 2
with him was the one thing that kept that vacation from becoming the worst of my life. The spring break trip to New Orleans where my friend got hookworm walking barefoot at a Zydeco festival is probably number one on that list. That was the same vacation where I got stabbed in the arm with a broken bottle by a French Quarter prostitute named Vantressa.

Almost every summer since then I have seen Todd Glenn. When family vacations didn’t bring me to Tucson, I would find an excuse to take a bus or a plane by myself and hang out with my buddy Todd.

We spoke regularly on the phone. I don’t think I would call Todd my best friend, but I have a deep suspicion that I was and maybe still am Todd Glenn’s best friend. There was a certain desperation to him. Like he was constantly afraid I would disappear from his life.

Todd’s father died in 1996 only a couple weeks after Todd’s eighteenth birthday. His father left Todd half of his money and all of his car. The house in Tucson went to a woman Todd had never met, but who was named in the will as “Sweet Melissa.” She had two kids of her own and little time for Todd. She wanted to get the house on the market as soon as possible so she could take the money and move to Michigan.

There was never any doubt that I would fly down to Tucson and help Todd, but when I called to confirm my plans he was inconsolable. I love Todd like a brother, but if I had known then what I know now, I might have bailed on him. Like a boyfriend abandoning his girlfriend after a car accident turns her into a paraplegic. I was too young and free to be tied down by Todd and his deep depression.

A black cloud hung over my trip to Tucson. Todd wasn’t laughing; he wasn’t the animated guy I remembered. As we boxed up Todd’s things I kept catching him crying. He would wipe tears from his eyes as I looked away and shuffled past him with another box full of old toys or books.

There was nothing funny about the job of emptying his dad’s house. Nothing amusing at all, other than the hundreds of porno tapes Todd’s dad kept in a locked series of filing cabinets.

“I thought it was his office stuff,” Todd said as we pried open another drawer.

The tapes were all, thankfully, professionally produced. I don’t know if Todd could have handled discovering a home movie of his dad sticking the old Glenn sausage to Sweet Melissa.

Later that night, after we had driven all of the boxes of stuff over to Todd’s apartment in Tucson, we filled the back of the rental truck with porno and we drove it out into the desert. A case of warm Budweiser fueled us through the cold desert night as we heaped the porno into a pile and drenched it with gasoline.

The mushroom cloud of fire that erupted from the heap of pornos singed off Todd’s eyebrows and the hair on one of my arms. We didn’t care; we were both laughing hysterically as the cloud of incendiary smut blotted out the stars above. We danced around like mad Indians, hooting and swigging cheap bourbon until we both collapsed on the hard dirt.

I watched Asia Carrera’s face bubble and burn in the heat at the edge of the fire and I remember thinking to myself that this was the cathartic moment Todd needed to get past his father’s death. He deeply resented Sweet Melissa. After all, she was the woman evicting him from his father’s house. But Todd really blamed his father for the betrayal, for allowing Sweet Melissa into his house.

I was wrong about the catharsis, of course. Our pyro for pornos adventure in the desert did nothing for Todd emotionally. Life is never as neat and literary as that.

The Arizona Highway Patrol found us sprawled next to a smoldering fire in the early hours of the morning. It might have been easier for us to go undetected setting fire to the pornos on the steps of the police station in Tucson. Out in the desert the smoke of a fire is visible well beyond the horizon, and burning VHS tapes create a particularly dense black smoke.

“All right, you fruits,” a square-jawed patrolman said as he nudged me awake with his shoe. “You get this shit cleaned up and get moving.”

He and his partner roused us from our uncomfortable sleep and set us to work burying the remains of the fire and collecting our empty beer cans. Once he was satisfied we had cleaned our impromptu campsite he handed over a ticket. Todd snatched it from my hands, but I had just enough time to see it was in the low three figures.

“You two have a nice day,” the patrolman said.

His partner spit on the ground. It was a classic cowboy gesture of disrespect and a clear message that they were not about to countenance some sissified argument over the ticket. We loaded into the rented truck and drove away with the pair of patrolmen watching us from the side of the road.

They say you have to hit rock bottom before you can begin to recover, but after his father’s death Todd hit rock bottom fairly quickly and then just stayed there. He was never able to hold a job, aspire to higher education, or really do much of anything. He lived on public assistance and some pittance of money from family members and he increasingly relied on me for all contact with the outside world. As someone who can be antisocial at times, I can only begin to relate what a terrible mistake that was for him.

As the years wore on and I entered the professional workforce, Todd continued to languish alone and miserable in Tucson. He drank constantly and his health deteriorated as he suffered from a series of bizarre ailments and unusual injuries.

In 1997 Todd suffered for two months with croup, a disease that usually afflicts infants and small children. I spent the last two weeks of those two months nursing him back to health, sleeping on his couch in his roach-motel of a hovel and waking up in the middle of the night to his barking cough.

In early 1998 he suffered a stress-related blackout and was hit in the shins when he wandered in front of a miniature trolley. The trolley derailed and several children were slightly injured. Todd blamed himself and became suicidal while recovering from micro fractures to his shin bones. During this recovery, he called me at all hours to complain about every imaginable topic.

Later that year, Todd was drinking at one of the only bars that still allowed him in the door. After downing multiple beers and shots of cheap tequila, Todd wandered out into the quiet streets and encountered a coyote. He then attempted to wrestle the coyote and was badly bitten on his arm. When the ambulance arrived, Todd refused treatment and attempted to stagger home. He confessed that he never made it, instead passing out inside a Dumpster full of rancid meat next to a butcher’s.

The open wound became infected and Todd developed gangrene. He called me and told me that his arm smelled funny and I insisted he go to the hospital. They cut away part of his arm and attached a hideous compress of live maggots to chew off the dead skin while a megadose of antibiotics did battle with the infection. Todd didn’t do himself any favors as he recovered.

I had made friends in Tucson during a few of my earlier visits with Todd, and I begged them to check in on him. The news was not good. Todd was drinking more than ever, suicidal again, and the house call nurse who was changing his horrible maggot bandage was on the verge of giving up on him.

Todd had stretched our friendship past the breaking point. I had no reason to go help him out again. And yet, I could not sit by as he literally rotted to death.

Against my better judgment, I caught the earliest possible flight to Tucson. Unbeknownst, I was on a collision course with Lindsay Dawn Riley.

The Whirlwind, Reaped

Most of the windows were broken out and covered over with cardboard. Todd had randomly ripped up carpet and smashed or punched about twenty holes through the drywall in every single room. His house smelled like cat piss and he had never owned a cat in his life.

Every day a nurse and a big Mexican guy in an Ocean Pacific tank top came and applied the maggots to Todd’s arm. This involved the Mexican guy chasing Todd around his house, tackling him, and then holding him still while the nurse swabbed writhing white maggots under his bandages.