(DISCLAIMER: The following entry contains several racial epithets and instances of human rights abuse. Beefcarcass.com does not condone or support such language or any of the actions described herein. However, in the interest of journalistic accuracy, and for possible use as evidence against the man at his eventual trial, we print Dr. Harvey “Hoot” Cracker’s words unedited.)
THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS, 1996
I was on another one of my famous and exciting adventures through some foreign backwater hellhole. You know the kind I mean, where the locals aren’t… American.
The wind came down the mountain like a rush of cold water. I pulled up the collar of my awesome leather jacket and pulled down the brim of my cool guy fedora, and pressed on. I knew the cursed red ruby was close.
A young Asian voice ran up behind me. “Dr. Hoot! Dr. Hoot! You walk too fast!” It was Short-Stick, the small Chinese boy I’d stolen in Korea. I’d meant to sell him for supplies somewhere on the border but I got drunk and forgot.
“Jesus!” I said. “You’re still here?”
“Wait for me!” he whined in a shrill and irritating voice. “I have no family!”
“Not this again. Look, I shot all of your family members in the face by accident.”
“But you promise, Dr. Hoot! You promise to sell me for cash to new family!”
“I forgot,” I said. “Besides, I gave you that Yankees hat, didn’t I? How many Chinese boys like you have a nice American Yankees hat?”
“But I tell you!” the boy complained in broken English. “I Mets fan!” He tugged at my jacket. “Where we going now, Dr. Hoot?”
“Fortune and glory, kid. The fabled red ruby of Kathmandu is somewhere in this mountain.”
“Doctor Hoot,” the boy said in a low hush, “I don’t trust him.”
“Who?” I said. “Our shifty-eyed Sherpa, Mongo? Why, what’s wrong with him?” Our heavily dressed guide Mongo walked ahead of us at ten paces, occasionally glancing back over his shoulder, eyeing us with suspicion. But I was confident he didn’t speak American.
The boy said, “What if he lead us into trap?”
“Trap?” I said. “Like some kind of elaborate and convoluted death chamber? Kid, you’ve seen too many movies; this is the real world. If anything he’ll probably just try to kill us with a rock and use our dead bodies to satisfy his sexual perversions, like I would do.”
“Just shoot him now!”
“Listen,” I said. “As soon as we find the jewel, I’ll shoot him right in the back of the head. Okay? Does that make you feel better?”
“You promise?”
“Yeah.”
Suddenly Mongo whirled around, shouting something in a savage tongue. With a kukri blade in his hand he lunged for my neck. Instinctively I grabbed the Chinese boy and used him as a human shield.
This stopped the man dead in his tracks, his curved blade held frozen in the air. “What?” I said. “Is it bad luck for your people to kill a Chinaman?” I realized then how little I knew or cared about the Sherpa’s useless culture.
“No!” Mongo said. “I Yankees fan!”
I threw the boy at him. This knocked Mongo off his footing and sent him over the ledge. In his heavy furs the man looked like a dead bear as he careened into the chasm below. He didn’t scream, didn’t make a sound. “What a pro,” I said. “But now we’re stuck without a guide.”
“It’s okay, Dr. Hoot! I stole his map!”
The boy fumbled the ancient yellow parchment from his bag with tiny Chinese fingers and handed it to me.
“Goddamn it, Short-Stick,” I said. “This is a page out of a phonebook.”
“I told you! I no read English!”
“Do you read numbers, you little shit?”
“And don’t call me Chinaman!” the boy cried. “It outdated and disrespectful! I Chinaboy!”
“Shut up. What else did you steal?” I grabbed the bag from his shoulder and shuffled through it, finding a magazine. The boy’s face turned red as a Chinese apple. “This is a Playboy,” I said. “From 1975?” I rolled the magazine up in my hand and began thrashing him with it. “You little Chinese pervert! Where are your values?”
“No, Dr. Hoot! Please! I cannot stand another beating!”
When I finished beating him I said, “It’s getting dark. We’ll set up camp on the next landing.”
“You still want to go forward, Dr. Hoot?”
“That red ruby is worth a shiny penny, Short-Stick. And I owe a lot of people money.”
“But aren’t you going to put it in museum, Dr. Hoot? For historical and educational purposes?”
“What the fuck are you talking about? No, I’m gonna sell it on Ebay.”
We set up camp and got a fire going. I took out the pot and dumped in the beans.
“Please, Dr. Hoot!” Short-Stick said. “No more beans!”
“Shut up. You love beans.”
“They make you fart too much, Dr. Hoot! Too stinky!” He waved his hand in front of his nose.
“Nonsense,” I said, while farting. “Besides, it’s all we got.” I farted again.
“What about hoagie sandwich?”
“No. The cold cuts are mine.”
We ate our beans by the light of the stars and looked out at the world below the mountain. Low clouds masked the tops of the forests like cotton. We could just barely see the ghostly light of some faraway village. I farted a bunch more times.
When the kid finally closed his little Chinese eyes I went for my satchel and pulled out the magazine. I’d always appreciated a hefty 70’s bush. I’m not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with my mother.
A PACK OF BLOODTHIRSTY SHERPAS
At some point during the night I awoke to the cold steel of a razor blade at my neck. The kid was trying to shave me again. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I hate beard stubble!” Short-Stick said. “Make you look homeless!”
“I told you!” I shouted. “It’s part of my look!”
We wrestled like Indians (Editor’s Note: Native Americans). I smacked the razor out of his hand and slapped the shit out of him. He was just a kid, after all, and kids are easy to smack around.
Unfortunately in all of the tumult and shouting I failed to notice the pack of bloodthirsty Sherpas gathering in the shadows. They fell upon us with a vengeful hate, their kukri blades flashing in the light of the fire and slashing at the air. In their animal furs and the flicker of shadows they looked like a pack of crazed wolves. I threw the kid at the nearest one.
However, this time I missed my target– the kid sailed clear past the guy and disappeared over the cliff. “Ah, shoot,” I said, which gave me an idea. I removed the revolver from my belt and started firing. One Sherpa got it in the shoulder, then the gut. Another one took a bullet in the leg moments before I kicked him in the head, knocking him out cold.
The third one nearly killed me. With a slash of his blade I took one across the stomach, but my fast action guy reflexes made the slice little more than a flesh wound. My shirt was ripped, exposing my hot abs. The view distracted the Sherpa long enough for me to take aim at his head. His last words were, “It was worth it.” Then I splattered his brains on the rock wall behind him.
I never saw the fourth guy coming. Before I knew it a knife was in my shoulder. I spun ’round; the gun was knocked from my hand. The bearded man raised the shining blade above his head, ready for another strike. And I would be dead right now if it weren’t for that fucking kid. “Dr. Hoot!” I heard his Chinese voice say. He had survived his fall, I guess, probably blown back against the cliff wall like a sheet of paper. The kid maybe weighed eighty pounds soaking wet, but he put every last ounce of it into his attack, and sent his tiny body spiraling like a football into the side of the raging Sherpa. The Sherpa flew forward, stumbling, and tripped face first into the fire. He burned himself alive, screaming. Probably fucked up the kid for life. For me it was just another Tuesday. I removed the kukri blade from my shoulder and cast it aside.
Later, when the screaming finally died down, that one Sherpa I’d only knocked unconscious started to come around. We bound him quickly. “The ruby is cursed!” he told us in his foreign devil’s tongue. “It brings only destruction!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, tending to my wound. “Well, you never met Louie the Shark. I’m into this guy for twenty G’s. I never should have opened that hot dog stand. Okay, kid…” I nodded, and Short-Stick brought the torch forward.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Just do it!” I said.
And Short-Stick cauterized my wound. I yowled in pain, a sound slightly comic but indisputably manly.
“Please! Do not seek the ruby!” our attacker pleaded. “Whoever lays hands upon it shall find only grave misfortune!”
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t touch the ruby. Now just tell me where it is so I don’t touch it by accident.”
The Sherpa saw no fault in this logic, and told us about the cave at the top of the mountain. I thanked him and shot him in the throat. “Let’s go, kid,” I said. We took some furs from the bodies, wrapped ourselves for warmth, and headed up the narrow path.
“Wow, Dr. Hoot!” Short-Stick said. “You kill everybody! You like some kind of psycho!”
“Good work back there, by the way. When we get out of this, I promise to sell you. I can’t promise that it will be to nice people, but I can promise you I’ll never think about you again.”
“Really?” Short-Stick said, with a smile on his Chinese face from ear to ear.
“Sure,” I said. Why not, I thought. Let the little fucker’s last few hours of life be happy. God knows I owed it to him for killing his entire family and three of his pets on accident.
A BIG FUCKING CAVE
Sometime later, when the morning sun had just begun to spread its white light across the stones, we reached our destination. The cave mouth was just where the dying Sherpa had promised. Maybe they were a noble people after all, and I briefly considered amending my course curriculum on the subject. See, I was a professor at the time, or rather I was pretending to be.
We lit our torches and entered the cave. Here a bunch of gross stuff happened. There were bats the size of dogs and tarantulas the size of cats. The bat-dogs tried to carry Short-Stick away while the tarantula-cats attacked my genitals. After a hair-raising battle I clubbed the spiders into little furry piles of green goo, while the kid still screamed away in his shrill Chinese voice as the bats lifted him over a pit.
His tiny body flailing in midair, he tried like a dork to burn the bats with his torch, which wasn’t the most convincing special effect. Close-up on my face. A flash of inspiration. I remembered the whip at my side, and grabbed hold.
“Hang on, kid!” I said. “I’m gonna do the thing now.”
I cracked the whip loudly. It came back around at me and took out my right eye. I had never used a whip before, and don’t know why I thought now was a good time to start. I’m not even sure what I was trying to accomplish, really. I mean, was I going to whip the bats away, one by one, causing them to drop the kid into the pit? Was I going to try to whip the kid? Was he supposed to grab the whip? It would have just cracked against his little hand, or seriously injured him. I really had no idea what I was doing.
Short-Stick kept shrieking at me, like I was doing this on purpose or something. I had problems of my own. There was blood gushing from my eye-hole. I found my eyeball a few yards away from me, covered in dirt. I carefully wiped it down and placed it in my pocket just incase it was worth something.
I was just about to help that whiny kid when somebody went to the trouble for me. Two pistol shots rang out across the cavern walls. One of the bats burst into guts. The others only gripped the boy tighter in their fear. Suddenly a rope shot out of the darkness, wrapping itself around the boy. Two more gunshots later and the kid swung his way to safety.
I stumbled about the tunnel, wondering what in the hell was going on, when the familiar voice struck my ears. “How are ya, Cracker? Long time no see.” It was Louie the Shark, my old nemesis…
“Louie,” I said, turning to see his fat face grinning at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I want my money,” said that bloated sac.
I glanced nervously at the pistol in his hand. “Look, I’m good for it,” I said. “I’m about to be good for it. See, there’s this jewel…”
“Time’s up, Cracker. No more games.”
“No game,” I said. “Really. There’s a treasure in this here cave. And I’m the only man that can find it.”
Louie turned to Short-Stick, who had just escaped the pit. “Is that true, kid?”
The boy said snappily, “Why else we be here?” That seemed to settle it. Another member was added to our party. The gun held to my back, Louie walked us down the spiraling path into darkness.
THAT CURSE I WAS TALKING ABOUT
Most of what follows was pretty typical for me. There were a bunch of booby traps, a lava pit or two, I almost died a bunch of times, and then we found the jewel.
It sat upon a pedestal of stone, and glowed with an eldritch red light. I stepped toward it. A very sweaty Louie thumbed back the trigger. “Not so fast,” he said. “That sucker is mine.” Louie reached out and grabbed the unholy jewel. He held the precious stone in his palm, his eyes locked inside of it. Then he started to laugh. “Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.”
“So take it,” I said, hands in the air. “I was gonna give it to you anyway, Lou. Honest, I was.”
“Sure, sure. You would have gambled it away in the first bar you found, you goddamn degenerate.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled. “You’re probably right. So… we’re even now, huh? You’ll just let me go?”
“Sure,” Louie said. “Or I could just shoot you dead right here. No one would ever know.”
But I still had an ace up my sleeve.
“There’s just one thing,” I said to Louie. “Earlier… why didn’t you just let the kid fall to his death?”
“Don’t you know?” Louie said with a smile. “Among my people it’s bad luck to kill a Chinaman.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Not among mine.” With a mighty heave I sent Short-Stick flying for the last time, his tiny body like an oblong torpedo straight into Louie’s fat face. The two of them toppled backward into the abyss, never to be seen again. Their screams echoed throughout the caverns– but just before Louie fell, just as he lost his balance, Louie’s hand shot forward and the red jewel escaped. It floated up into the air and I saw my chance. I leapt forward, nearly throwing myself into the chasm, and caught the shiny thing in my fingertips.
And as I stood there staring into the ruby’s red depths, the jewel began to glow, and I remembered the Sherpa’s words: “Whoever lays hands upon it shall find only grave misfortune!”
All at once my surroundings began to change; the walls became a liquid painting that dripped, and as I strained to find meaning in the cascading images I caught a glimpse of a terrible future:
I saw myself there. I am almost eighty years old, and still doing this kind of shit. I’d long hoped my later years would be reflective, restful, a time to take solemn inventory of all that I had learned and accomplished in my life. Instead I am probably going to be punching soldiers fifty years my junior in the mouth with arthritic knuckles, and dragged through dirt roads behind random vehicles. The dozens of concussions I will no doubt endure will leave my brain crippled and my wriggling form riddled with Parkinson’s disease, while various stab and gunshot wounds will surely see me pissing and shitting into a plastic bag for the rest of my life from the discomfort of a wheelchair. My nights will be plagued with insane visions of a bearded man in a red baseball cap and sunglasses shouting directions at me from a chair, an affable-seeming lunatic who will never let me go.
And I won’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore. None of it will matter, and none of it will be particularly interesting, until each new experience is just a hollow and spiteful echo of some former glory.
And why, I wonder.
Why will I do this to myself? What madness will compel me?
Why don’t I just stop?
But the answers do not come. Somehow I know they won’t, at least not in this lifetime.
In the fetal position I gripped the red ruby tightly until its sharp edges cut me. I bled, murmuring to myself in a pathetic stupor, “Fortune and glory… fortune and glory…”
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