ThEraPeutIc SKIn JobS #17

The point of these things is that they really did help on some shitty days. On days on where things were going particularly bad, it was nice to escape into a fictional world where anything could happen, even if it was just ended up being a lot of aimless driving about, masses of pointless violence and far too much irony and pop culture references.

I pretty much stopped doing them when I went to journalism school when I was 29, and got myself a life, but then I started up this blog, which still does the same thing, every day. 

It really does help.

    Taking it to the limit and pushing one-forty as he takes the corner, Dr. Skin’s smile grows improbably wide as he licks his lips and considers changing out of second. The engine squeals like a stuck pig as he floors it again, just getting the fucking thing under control as it threatens to slip out from underneath him.

     Granting mercy like a goddamn Buddha, Skin takes it up a notch, slipping into third, fourth, fifth in rapid succession, each millisecond gear change giving the sentient engine of the Car With No Name unparalleled relief, like the last aspirin on a Sunday morning.

     No need for acceleration anyway, thinks Skin as he eases off a little. He’d gotten bored with the police cars on his tail. They’ve been following for the last hundred clicks, but no threat. It’s been almost comical, like some kind of retarded escort, the cops forgetting that they were supposed to be leading the way. But Skin had grown weary of their aesthetically criminal flashing lights and intrusive sirens. Now, with acres of dust between him and his captors, Skin eases off and thinks about music.

     Jumping on a bandwagon that didn’t exist, he’s replaced 90% of his brain with the most fashionable wetware on the planet. The computer in his head is prone to the occasional crash and burn, but it’s worth it. Now he can access his entire musical knowledge with the flick of an eyebrow.

    Desperate for some music with an antipodean sense of humour and isolation, from around the turn of the century, Skin sends his preferences directly into the car stereo, its telepathically sensitive heart listening and responding with all due professionalism. The display on the dash confirms his choices, even as the first guitar riff kicks in.

     Katherine looks up from her drunken stupor, his brow furrowing as she reads the display. “What the hell is all this?”

     “Home town music,” replies Skin, taking his eyes off the road for a little longer than necessary. “Big, dirty amplified angst.”

     Her vodka-dried lips moving slightly as she reads the songs, immortalized in LCD, she turns to him when she’s done. “Where are you from, anyway? I don’t think you ever told me before.”
    
     “Really? How extraordinary.” 

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ThEraPeutIc SKIn JobS #17

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     Driving in the city, rain slick roads underneath harsh, antiseptic lights. Neon reflected in liquid, the smell of cold water on hot concrete, steam everywhere.

     Car slowed to a crawl, Skin can’t help softly humming the theme to ‘Taxi Driver’. It’s not 1975 New York outside the car, but its pretty close. Pools of scum and villainy in an archetypal location. If he had a better sense of humour, Skin might have laughed.

     “It’s good to talk,” mumbles Katherine, waking up again. She’s about to utter something extraordinarily witty when nausea overwhelms her and she’s forced to desperately lunge out the window, lean over the side, be sick and make sure she doesn’t get any on the paint work. Her filth joins other disreputable fluids on the street, washed away in a river of mucus and blood.

     “You okay?” asks Skin, a veritable fountain of compassion. His companion looks at him, her lower lip jutting out in misery, and Skin has to resist the urge to pull over there and then and have his way with her. She’s changed her appearance along with the name, and it doesn’t half give him the horn. She’s now got a vaguely Irish accent, along with a strong chin, wild blonde hair, thick lips and astoundingly blue eyes. But, despite all her alterations, one thing has remained constant. She still has an arse worth dying for.

     “I want to be a professional wrestler,” moans Katherine as she settles back into the seat. She reaches for the bottle of Stoli, but its long drained dry, and she hurls it out the open window. She doesn’t intend it to, but the bottle bounces off the head of a poor blind boy, setting in motion a chain of events too improbable to go into here. 

     She looks out the back window as the lad clutches the side of his head and swears in ancient Arabic, but it doesn’t really hold her attention and she turns around, looks ahead and tries to figure out where they’re going. Dr Skin doesn’t pay any attention, his full concentration fixed on driving this pig of a vehicle. Silent, dark houses slide by in the night as they cruise through suburbia, testaments to the stifling nature of 21st century life. Strange words boil to the surface of Skin’s brain as he drives, and he almost feels a poem coming on.

     Luckily, any such aspirations are swiftly deleted from his cortex when the fax machine between the seats sparks into life. Skin had replaced the handbrake with the device after coming to the conclusion that he’d never have any reason to brake, but this is the first time its been used. The technology has been swiftly replaced by more digital methods, but Skin had decided to keep the machine anyway as a symbol of the swift current of the new.

     Katherine frowns and reached for the paper that the machine spits out, large letters spelling out a strange doctrine in a superb font. Her frown grows as she reads what it has to say.

     “Well?” asks skin as the heavens open up again, drenching the car, road and everything in black rain. “What is it?”

     “It’s from God,” replies Katherine. ‘Apparently he’s decided to revise the Ten Commandments, because he’s sent the new ones to us.”

     “Really?’ says Skin, his eyebrow arching in his own unique manner. “What are they?”

     “Oh no you don’t,” spits Katherine, scrunching the paper up and holding it to her ample chest. “I’m not about to reveal a new design for life without more booze. I demand more alcohol!”

     Skin gestures towards the back seat. “There's a bottle of Pepe Lopez in my bag there. Will that do?”

     ‘Fuck yeah!” swears Katherine with girlish enthusiasm. She lunges over and seizes Skin’s case, tearing into it and pulling out the bottle of tequila, which now has a life expectancy of a 1970s Marvel Editor in Chief. She’s shaking so much, she can barely get the cap off, but she manages all the same.

     Katherine downs it straight, and offers it to her lifelong companion. “One for the road?”

     “If you drink and drive, you’re a bloody idiot,” intones Skin, remembering an advertising campaign from his youth. “But I never made any claim towards intelligence.”

     He takes the bottle and drinks half of it in one gulp, the liquid searing his throat, waking him up and slowing his reaction time in one fell swoop. “Holy fuck!” he blurts out. “That’s some good shit!”

     “Gimme!” says Katherine, snatching the bottle back and draining the remainder.

     Skin turns down the next right, gunning the engine as they leave the city behind, heading for the country. The silent homes are replaced by endless, empty fields, but Skin feels slightly more at ease. “Well?” he asks as he runs over a rabbit. The animal shrieks its last as its intestines burst out of its arse, roadkill in an instant. ‘What are the new commandments?”

     “Oh yeah, I forgot.” She squints as she re-reads the new commandments. “Lesse. Well, the first nine are just the same phrase repeated over and over: ‘Be nice.’

     Skin grins and nods enthusiastically. “Makes sense to me,” he cries out over the roar of the engine as he pushes it even further. The dark countryside outside the car degenerates into a blur, details lost at this speed. “What’s the tenth?”

     As she replies, Katherine rubs her lips over the rim off the bottle, determined to get the last molecules of liquid for her money. “Well, it says here… Heh.”

     “What?”

     ‘It says: ‘For fucks sake, don’t kill anybody’.”

     “I can live with that,” offers Skin as they approach a dark crossroads. Out of the corner of his eye he can see another vehicle coming in at three o’clock, but he’s got the right of way, and doesn’t slow.

     Katherine nods, refusing to tear her eyes away from the Immaculate Fax. “Words to live by, all right. If only we….”

     She doesn’t get any further as Skin is forced to slam on the brakes to avoid the other car, which tears through the crossroads right in front of him. His drink-addled brain is barely up to the task, and the car skids to a stop in the center of the road. If they hadn’t bothered to fasten they’re their seatbelts, they’d have been fucked.

     “Jesus goddamn motherfuckin’ shit whore of a cunt bastard christ!” swears Skin, offending the sensibilities of decent folk everywhere as he pounds on the steering wheel with sweaty palms. “So much for the new house rules! If you can’t even give way when you’re supposed to, how the hell are you ever gonna be nice?”

     “Good fucking point,” agrees Katherine, pulling out her trusty gold-plated lighter and setting fire to the fax. It burns up unfeasibly fast and its all ashes in her hand in an instant.

     “Holy shit,” says Skin as she brushes the ashes away and reaches for a sensitive hand cream. “You realize what this means, don’t you?”

     “No. What?”

     “Joseph Campbell was fucking right!”

     After his idiotic outburst, Skin lapses back into silence. The engine is still idling, and he thinks about moving again, but there's words on the tip of his mind, and if he doesn’t get them out, he won’t be able to live with himself. “Katherine?”

     “Yeah?”

     “I can’t take it anymore, baby,” he says wearily, his tones heavy with depression. “The only way I can possibly go on is if I push it all further, living faster, higher and darker than ever before. Do you think I should?”

     Katherine nearly chokes on the giggles burning the back of her throat. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

     Skin’s depression lifts instantly and he smiles. “Of course I am.” He hits the accelerator and the car shoots ahead into the darkness. The sheer g-force of the rapidly increasing velocity pushes them further back into their seats as they drive along the highway, destination unwise.

     “Take it to the limit, baby,” says Katherine happily, finally getting in the last word and milking it for all its worth. “Take it to the limit.”

THE END