Teetering Bluffs: A Story Of Education: Chapter 9 (Nine) - Some Dream In/Of Hell, Jeffy Coitus

Chapter 9 (Nine) - Some Dream In/Of Hell, Jeffy Coitus

Pump Meat. Winterfrosh. Doublemount.

Ixtra?

When knocked out, the uneducated say you do not dream. The uneducated.

Educated.

But much stock is placed in education, when truth be told half the learning is socializing.

Or not, what do I know.

And the truth is that Lanugo Batter had failed himself in his education, as most students do.

Thus, he was present when some local toughs decided to rob Jimmy Dong's Gas Station in a fit of phallic rage, vendetta, and drunkeness.

Being knocked out, he dreamed. His dream went as follows::swollof sa tnew maerd siH

Sulfur stinging the nose, he awoke to find the most beautiful woman he had ever seen looking at him. And what's more, he was fairly certain this fiery beauty (literally- she was surrounded by fire) had come to the gas station before. But then again, who didn't buy gasoline these days? Homeless people?

It was only then that he realized homeless people buy gasoline for barrel fires, and scolded himself for his previous ignorance.

Having finally arrived at the conclusion that everyone buys gasoline, including the homeless and non-voters (Vote), Lanugo stared into a pair of eyes so blue he was sure they were black.

Then again, he thought, that was pretty silly. Nobody really has black eyes except for eskimos. Inuits! he quickly corrected himself as a gunshot rang off somewhere nearby, inexplicably. He was beginning to feel like he was embarassing himself to this beautiful girl (certainly beautiful) whom he had only just met. Ignorance seemed to leak into his every thought, or so he thought.

Never realizing, of course, she had no idea his thoughts.

Following this was an inner debate about whether this girl's blue eyes were "Deep Sea Blue" or perhaps "Midnight Blue" or "Grand Majesty's Navy Blue" or just "Dark Blue," which you will here be spared. He landed on "Dark Midnight Navy Blue" which conjured to his mind an army of Norsemen storming a beach, for some reason.

NORSEPEOPLE! You ignorant moron! She is judging you!

While Lanugo wished desperately that he'd paid more attention in school, the girl brushed back her red hair and spoke to him with teeth almost obtrusively wet. Details that men notice are always insignificant, and yet the fact that he managed to not stare at her chest is admirable enough that I feel OK telling you these pointless details.

"You're Lanugo Batter, and you're dead."

"No fucking way!" he shouted in her face, spit flying from his tongue and landing on her cheek.

She punched him in the gut with a heavily ringed, rather pale fist. For all the metal and force, he barely felt a caress.

"You are dead."

"Oh fuck." He believed her. This belief led to the realization that, as predicted by his mother (and all mothers for their children, really), that he had ended up in hell.

"I'm in hell, man, hell."

"I'm not a man, Lanugo Batter."

"But, like, you're Satan, right?"

"Yeah."

"Oh," he pondered for a moment, tried to think, failed, then tried again. "So, like, you're a chick."

Red lipped frown. Natural, though. There's no such thing as lipstick in hell. "I'm not a chick, Lanugo Batter. I'm dead."

Taking this thought in, which he felt was a bit heavy handed, Lanugo only managed a blank, slightly unnerved expression. "Oh, so, you don't have a..." but, thinking better for once in his life (death) he stopped himself and merely sat quiet.

"It's time to rebuild yourself, Lanugo Batter, so that you can herd."

"Heard? Don't you mean hear? Is there no such thing as grammar in hell?" Lanugo wasn't sure why he was being so sassy, but it felt pretty good, so he just rolled with it.

"You got a C- in senior English and only passed because the teacher pitied you. This after she saw you fondling a girl in the back of class daily and knew you'd never make anything of yourself besides a womanizer who'd eventually be 28 (TWENTY EIGHT) and have exhausted all chances of marriage due to an unfortunate herpes acquisition at a party that was not only highly popular, but also taped by three separate people. Taking the roundabout way, we arrive at the point of the story: you are not, and will never be, in a position to offer grammatical advice to anyone.

"Now get up," she didn't smile, or look smug, but was just very matter of fact. Satan is basically all business.

Scratching his crotch nervously, he lifted himself up with one hand. He could not take his eyes off of Satan's rather Dark Blue eyes. Or was that Navy Midnight... Ah fuck it, I can't remember.

"So you really don't think I'll ever get married?" he asked, defeat tinging his voice.

"I never said that. You'll be married when you're 38 (Thirty Eight) to an 18 (Ayteen) year old whose father will kill you," she replied, turning on her pale, bare feet that somehow managed to stay perfectly clean among all the ashes that received her toeprints like twisted, disturbing beach sand.

Toe prints, small, comforting, and alluring. Orange fire throwing light onto tiny puncture wounds in dark, dark grey under a hundred foot ceiling so high up it appeared to be a vaguely contoured and textured black. White robed, and swishing forward, there went Satan, flowing with predictably red hair, inexplicably dark blue eyes, and tiny little toe prints leading on through a grain sea of dark, dark sinner ashes.

Feeling emotional, and not entirely certain why, staring at Satan walking away, Lanugo realized exactly why all the angels revolted with her. Innate charisma, and beautiful in ways that no woman could possibly be, she certainly could convince him to denounce God.

And clearly had. For he was now dead. He was now in hell. Or so he thought.

Distracted enough by the wave of beauty that had crashed upon the vague, uninhabited cells of his brain, Lanugo would fail to realize the innate contradiction of a death dream predicting his future life (and death).

"So, what do I have to do to change? When do I do it? I'm still in my work uniform..."

Somewhere, ten (10) or more miles above his current position in Traditional King James Hell, the unconscious body of Lanugo Batter began to stir a beat as realization zapped around the core of consciousness in his head, failing to connect.

Frankly, it was like watching the Yankees play baseball. So much invested that it ought to have been nothing for this small victory, but struggle and defeat were the order of the hour. And thank God, the Yankees are a sad joke propagated through the years by rich cynics with no goal in life but masturbation and ego stroking (masturbation).

"What do you want to look like? How do you think you can look most powerful?" Satan asked, gazing out over a small hill they'd walked up when he wasn't paying attention. Or had he walked up the hill at all?

Strange.

"Powerful? Why would I need to look powerful?" he scratched his crotch, which had begun to burn slightly. Interestingly enough, he had yet to even feel the least bit of heat from the fire all around him. He was actually quite comfortable.

Satan smiled at him. "You're going to be herding those into the 'Try Again' pit." She raised her pale hand, and thin fingers, pointing at a furious group of souls rampaging around a Hell Hillside. They looked like Bison having a go at railroad workers. Nancy Grace's damned soul thrashed about, regretting every offensive breath she'd ever taken, finally.

"It'll take some time, and you'll need to be able to keep the attention of beings who are burning in all the fires that you aren't feeling yet."

The last word that fell off her pink tongue and into his ear made him shudder. "Well..." he said slowly, "I suppose I'll want some wings then. Big red glowing ones would be cool, I've always thought," and he began to float above the embers. Not understanding the dynamics of wings, Lanugo Batter wasn't aware that they were merely ornamental.

He was, in fact, levitating. Not flying.

"And to look tough..." he continued, "I suppose..." His thoughts immediately focused on his father, as most men do. Trying to conjure an image of the man in his head didn't work entirely, but the trauma of childhood was just enough to twist his current features into something much more hideous than he'd been previously.

If he had not been dreaming of this in hell, many women in Espantosoville would testify that anything managing to make Lanugo Batter's face uglier than it was would be unnatural, and perhaps impossible. Indeed, it was.

11 (ELEVEN)
13(Thurteen)

"Oh man, I want one of those sweet ass rings with my initials too!" he said, eyeing the ring on Satan's finger that had two letters inverted on it.

Curving her red lips into a smile, she replied, "Sorry Lanugo Batter. This is my seal. This is my weapon. You see, it's my name."

The point was, as usual, lost on Lanugo. "How is your name a weapon? And isn't your name Satan anyways? You have a last name, like Antichrist, or something?"

Lanugo thought this entirely clever. Sadly, for him it was.

"You don't get it because your name is only remembered by people who accidentally read the tag you wear on your chest when they're done pumping their gas. Now look in the mirror and tell me if you think you look intimidating enough to ward that crowd into what they will believe is a pit of lava," Satan stretched out her large white, strangely light-like wings. It was as if they weren't there at all, thin as air- If not for how bright and distractingly big they were.

"I think," replied Lanugo smugly, "The term you were looking for is Magma. It's alright Satan, you can't always be right."

"You do realize this is one of the easiest positions in all of Hell, right? You want to go out there and be herded like a fool among the other idiots? See how pained Johnny Depp's soul looks? I could put you in his corral for a while..."

Directing his dull eyes to where Satan indicated, Lanugo saw a soul branded enormously with the words "One Trick Hack" being stabbed by children with pointed steel sticks everytime he approached the edge of a circle-bed of burning coals. It looked pretty painful.

"Alright, sorry, I get it," he said, genuinely penitent, as he turned to the mirror that had appeared at his left.

He'd been turning to the left hand path all his life, really.

Gazing into the mirror, he realized that he was not a very attractive person. Like most people, he'd allowed politeness to convince him that he was at least decent looking, but that wasn't the truth.

Like his father, and all his male friends, he was hideous. But, he did look ready to run Nancy Grace around for a while with a sword, or maybe a very sturdy polearm. Both (htoB) were conveniently in his hands.

He decided to stick with the polearm.

"Alright, Satan, I'm ready."

"Who the Hell is that?" the girl said, not smiling anymore. She looked panicked, and blood ran from her nose. It dripped onto her pale feet, rolled into the cracks between her toes, and into the thick ash under her white feet.

Lanugo was confused. Not just by this sudden turnaround, but by all the shouting, and the feeling of shaking. The ground felt unstable.

Not Satan collapsed to her knees, her white robe being stained by profuse amounts of blood pouring from flared nostrils, and the ash under her. She coughed blood, spit blood, had blood all over her teeth.

"Satan, you should..." Lanugo heard his name repeatedly.

"I'll see you down here in ten (10) years, Lanugo Batter" forcing a tiny smile through the coughing, Not Satan looked up at him from her knees, as blood from her nose dripped onto the ring bearing the initials only she knew.

The educated say that you do not dream when you are knocked out. Interesting.

"Lanugo!" shouted Mindy Mashtatoor in his high pitched way of speaking. It's pretty obnoxious, no lie.

Slowly, LB regained consciousness. "What? What's going on?"

"You got knocked out, sweetheart, just take it easy," Mindy said, his hand uncomfortably close to Lanugo's balls.

Looking around the wrecked shop, head ringing with ache, LB couldn't figure out what was going on. Nothing seemed broken, even though some things were out of order.

And the cash register tray was on the floor, to his left. He pushed himself up against the counter. Vaguely, he recalled crossing to the other side of the counter when he noticed a sketchy looking guy stealing several packs of Winterfrosh gum.

The educated are well aware that there's a big difference between someone who buys Winterfrosh gum over Doublemount gum. Seriously, Winterfrosh tastes like frozen pubic hair. You can't trust somebody like that.

"According to the girl the cops have in custody," Mindy continued as cops milled around behind him, seemingly surveying the place, but really not doing much of anything, "when you stepped away from your drawer, the guy now in the cop car outside hit you in the back of the head with a baseball bat."

That seemed to match, thought Lanugo. Never in his life had he felt such a thumping within his usually empty brain. "She's in custody?" he asked, slowly trying to regain his faculties, Failing, but trying again.

"Yeah..." Mindy said, turning his head towards a dead body in front of the never-used second counter. Blood spatter had ruined several perfectly good copies of STARITCH magazine that claimed to have pictures of Jennifer Love Hewitt naked inside.

Lanugo's head dropped to his chest, he felt a terrible nausea rising up in him that had nothing to do with the body. From the time he was 9 (NINE) he'd watched violent movies for arousal's sake, so the blood didn't do anything to him.

If Mindy hadn't had his hand so uncomfortably close to LB's herpe nest, he might've even been aroused, headache or no.

"She... shot the guyth thbat?" he asked, slurring his speech.

"Oh, no," Mindy replied as he waved over a paramedic who had just arrived. Rather late, I know.

"Apparently she shot the guy who was going to shoot you. Guess you got some enemies, eh? Cops have her in the back of a car outside."

"... saved my life?" Lanugo forced out as a paramedic began to exercise his education on him.

Mindy nodded slowly, standing up, but not without a subtle rub on LB's thigh. "Yeah, I would say so."

Lanugo began to feel dizzy, and thought he might pass out again.

Not to dream, however. When one passes out, they do not dream. I'm assured of this by educated people.

"Whassername..."

"Oh," Mindy looked down at the pathetic, slightly bloodied mess that was Lanugo Batter, "Corrine Tubdolor, or something like that. Get some rest, I'll be out to the hospital later tonight. I just left a housefire, so I gotta go change."

He smiled down at LB, "Been a hell of a day for the both of us, eh guy?"

With that, he walked out of the store and into a night that was just beginning to cool.

Lanugo passed out.

Keith "Asshole Who Hit Me With A Bat" Merkin sat in a cop car, still shaking. He really couldn't believe he managed to not get shot by that crazy bitch who killed his friend.

Corrine Tubdolor shook also, her hands sweating a significant amount, and her lip bloody from biting. Her brown hair stuck to her wet, tear-stained face.

Everyone had a bad day.

Even Tony Kinter, who was too busy stabbing himself in the leg to notice the biggest part of the "Gas Station Holdup" piece the next day. Coincidentally, he would go to the same hospital Lanugo Batter had just been to, and arrive just as LB was leaving.

But that's life. Unless you get shot in the head holding up a gas station.

END CHAPTER 9 (NINE)