Devlin IV
Last Updated on Saturday, 03 April 2010 18:05
Veinarmory-Blog - Miscellaneous Snorts
I guess you noticed I disappeared... again. It was important. I signed up for this makeover getaway. They were supposed to teach me how to apply makeup in such a way as to mask the fact I am a foul-tempered alcoholic bastard. It didn't work. The picture above was taken during the meeting wherein I was refunded my money and asked to leave. Once again the Hack is cast out, bereft of the solace he imagined possible with a kinder, gentler visage.
Anyway, I'm back; busy answering emails, comments and shipping out the junk you idjits bought. I hope ya had a happy holiday and everything's wonderful and yer digestive tracts are in order. There is no need to keep checking to see if Dunkin III is ready. When I get it recorded I'll email a link to everyone who has it coming FREE and announce it. My database is likely screwed up, so when I announce the links went out, if you don't get one, email me from the address you used to make the purchase and I'll make sure you get your link. As you all know I don't bug ya with emails, newsletters, announcements of the new toaster I'm using to warm shots of rum on top of or other minutiae. So this email is a one-time thing. If ya don't want an email, then email me and I'll mark yer name off.
Anyone who's bought anything since I made the Zane release and thermometer gets Dunkin III Free. I don't know when it will be finished, but rest assured I'm working on it whenever I'm not drinking. I think my Devlin voice blew out another microphone (third one) or I blew out my earphones, or I am not drinking enough to make me sound better. For those who mention the loudness of my recordings, let me clue ya in, I'm an expert at writing entertaining stories. I don't know squat about sound, and this is the big point—I don't care. Nor am I gonna learn. I'm teaching myself Spanish now, just as an exercise in keeping the brain limber, but it's boring and my neural pathways are overloaded. Studying sound waves and how they are converted from digital to analog or whatever, is worse than boring. I'd rather massage my gonads with an ear of dried field corn. So if the recorded works bother your ears, try the PDF version. Or, and I mean this with all the bounteous love I regularly extend to my fanbase—go fuck yourself.
GCC 2010
Here's a sneak look at chapter One of Devlin IV:
Roswell, New Mexico — July 8, 1947
The alien craft suffered a tiny breech in the hull, the result of a poorly struck golf ball. The ship, its structural integrity compromised, made the only logical course correction available. Losing speed and control, the four occupants attempted an emergency sub-space communication, only to realize, too late, the true extent of the damage. Massive critical systems failure; they were going down, with no way to communicate their position.
Rerouting all available power to the propulsion unit, the crew accelerated the damaged vessel through earth’s atmosphere, set course for a remote area, diverted all remaining power to the life-support-pod shield, and foamed-in for the inevitable crash.
Without propulsion, the unwieldy ship, designed for zero-gravity compensation, slowed, began a violent wobble, then impacted in a remote portion of desert the crew calculated, aimed, and programmed the autopilot to seek.
No massive fireball or explosion; simply a loud, horrendous crash scattering pieces in a two-thousand-foot radius of initial impact. A near-obliteration of the ship, but not the life-support pod. On impact, it continued a harsh, tumbling, skittering path along its trajectory, until finally, the bullet-shaped pod dug-in to the hard-packed desert floor and punched a forty-foot-long divot to a complete stop.
Midway through the crash, the pod’s shielding deteriorated rapidly, and even though enclosed in a foam stasis pool, the occupants were battered.
An advance team of US soldiers converged on the site, gathered every stray molecule of debris, and carted it away to a highly-secure facility.
They missed the departure of four smallish vaguely humanoid creatures tearing across the desert in two ordinary-looking golf carts.
**********
The Present
“The Japanese are taking over the world,” Redbeer said.
“What are you gibbering about?” Jimbob asked.
“The Japs,” Redbeer continued. “They’re buying all the golf courses. Taking over the world, one golf course at a time.”
“Yeah,” Jimbob said. “Well I hope they buy this one, and bulldoze the fucker flat. Build a toxic waste dump.”
“They did,” Redbeer said.
“They did what?”
“The Japs, they bought the place.”
“I’m Japanese, asshole,” Lee announced. “Don’t call me a Jap.”
“Did Slim really sell this pit?”
“SLIM!” Redbeer yelled. “The Floppy Fourskins are back from their round. They ain’t believing you sold the place.”
The conversation took place in the Nineteenth Hole Lounge on the Sand Warbler Golf Course located in the middle of the Sandwarbler Retirement Community. The land was known locally as the Sandwarbler Mosquito Breeding Swamp.
The lounge was a forty-foot square plywood abomination with a long pine bar, two one-person bathrooms and a window air conditioner vainly struggling against the central Florida heat. The ice machine rattled intermittently like a hay thresher caught in a patch of kudzu, and the room was too dark to see from one end of the bar to the other. The patrons agreed this was a good thing—bugs aren’t really there if you can’t see them.
Slim came out of the giant walk-in cooler where the Minnesota native found reason to enter fifty or sixty times a day. Two years before he’d had the huge cooler installed up against the back of the bar, sticking out like an extra stainless steel room. He called it his office, said it reminded him of home.
Slim was a tall, skinny man in his late sixties, retired from his position as a district manager for a grocery store chain. He’d lost everything but the golf course by less-than-shrewd investment in the Stock Market.
“Yeah, I got an offer and I’m taking it,” Slim said. “And Redbeer, no more calling people Japs. It ain’t politically correct.”
“This is horrible,” Lee Wong, a Japanese/American born in Miami. “They’ll start mowing the fairways, seeding the greens, putting real sand in the sandtraps, then no more twelve bucks for eighteen and a cart.”
“This is terrible!” Jimbob, a retired accountant said. “Without this place I’ll have to spend my days with the wife.”
“Quit whining, Jimbob,” Tex Mulligan, a rotund realtor said. “You’re wife is getting the worst part of the deal.”
“Yeah, you two been together forever,” Lee added. “We know you love her.”
“Of course I love her,” Jimbob said. “But I been coming home at 5:15 for thirty years, then we spend time together until eleven o’clock.; we change that routine and we’ll be divorced in a month. Slim, you can’t sell this place; it’ll ruin my marriage.”
“You just said you hope someone buys it and bulldozes it flat,” Redbeer said.
“I was angry,” Jimbob answered. “I lofted a shot into that cesspool on eighteen and lost another hole to The Devil.”
“How many times I gotta tell you, it’s not a cesspool; it’s a damn water hazard.” Slim corrected. “There’s fish and alligators in there. It’s a federally designated wildlife habitat, that’s why I don’t mow around it. Illegal, I could be fined by the EPA.”
“It was little Japanese people who bought it,” Redbeer said. His real name was Bob Redman, but he was colorblind and poured red dye instead of green in the beer one St. patrick’s day and the locals started calling him Redbeer. “They was in wheelchairs, four of ‘em all wrapped up in blankets, and they had huge bodyguards.”
“Did you already sell?” Tex asked.
“They sent over a contract for me to sign,” Slim said. “I gotta run over to my lawyer’s office.”
”This is horrible,” Lee repeated.
“You cheap bastard,” Slim said. “All you care about is paying twelve bucks for eighteen holes. You got enough money to buy this place yourself.”
The door opened, bathing the tomblike bar in unwelcome sunlight.
“HAR! You turds owe me more beer than this dive keeps on hand.”
The final member of the Floppy Foreskins Foursome entered speaking loud and smiling wide, displaying every tooth but the half-dozen obscured by a large, smoldering cigar. He was well over six-feet- four inches, lean and muscular with cartoonishly defined ridges and knots of tendon jumping along his exposed forearms. Tanned a deep nut-brown, dressed in a garish Hawaiian shirt featuring dancing monkeys in grass skirts, short pants, and loafers with no socks, he looked the very antithesis of your typical golfer. His name is Devlin, and he’s an alcoholic vampire.
“Devlin, Slim says he sold the place,” Lee announced.
“WHAT?” Devlin screamed, his smile drooping to rearrange the deep laugh lines in his face to something resembling unadorned menace. He snatched the beer from the bar and poured the entire bottle down his throat without gulping, belched, formed his forehead into rows of serious lines and puffed angrily on the cigar, smoke engulfing his head. “Gimme another beer, I’m not feeling happy.”
“Devil, I ain’t making any money here, and I ain’t getting any younger,” Slim said. “The wife and I want to do some traveling.”
“Have ya sold the dump yet?” Devlin asked.
“No, I haven’t signed the papers.”
“How much you gettin’?”
Devlin continued puffing furiously on the cigar while emptying his pockets of lint, a massive roll of folding money, a handful of beer caps, golf tees, tattered business cards, rubber bands, bent and mangled credit cards, two golf balls, and assorted other junk which he tossed on the bar and fished through, eyes squinting under the cloud of cigar smoke.
“A million-two,” Slim said.
“For this swamp?” Jimbob cried out.
Devlin pulled a folded up paper from the mass and looked over at Slim. “This is the worst fargin’ golf course on the North American continent,” Devlin said. “It don’t top out at 5000 yards from the Blues. Ya got mutant weeds encroaching on the fairways that Napalm wouldn’t clear away. There’s power lines over two of the damn par three greens. The grounds harder than a dumpster full a bowling balls. There’s cesspools posing as water hazards. The greens are like puttin’ on a dirt road, yet, for some reason I think it’s worth it. I’m gonna write ya a check for a million, two hundred, and five thousand. That extra five is for you and the wife to go on a cruise.”
“You have that kind of money?” Lee asked.
“Yeah, I got more’n I can spend,” Devlin answered. “It ain’t in this account, but them moneychangers in charge will move it from one a my other accounts. If they don’t, I’ll tear down the building, or move my money somewhere else depending on my mood.”
“You crack me up, Devil,” Tex said. “You talk like you were Superman.”
“I killed Superman and ate him. Tasted like chicken. Har!” Devlin said, smiling at Tex. “Ya gotta understand, there’s a pecking order. Ya got yer local and state government, yer federal government with the judicial, legislative and executive branches, you got yer cabal of rich scheming bastards, then, at the very top of the pyramid, ya got me. Now all the rest of them is busy cornholing all the citizens and hoping not to piss me off, while I’m busy drinking with my pals. It’s the new world order. I’m personal friends a the Pope. Maybe I’ll get him to fly over and bless the grass that ain’t growing on that miserable seventh hole par five.”
“You’re really buying the place?” Slim asked.
“Yeah, I need a base a operations anyway. A place to get away from all the freeloaders and barnacles I got attached to me. I was gonna buy a beer distillery. Maybe I can put one here. Any a youse guys know how to make beer?”
“No,” everyone said.
“Oh, them Japanese are going to be angry,” Redbeer said. “They have big bodyguards.”
Comments
can I get ch.1,2 and 3 of Denlin IV