CHAPTER ONE

Georgie

WHO IS DRUNK JOHN?
I have no idea, but he is driving Justin and some other dude named Gilder up from the city after work today. I don’t know who this Gilder is either, but I don’t like him already. The plan called for three people and three people only: me, Justin and Georgie. Adding more people was never part of it. I wish I knew why Justin feels the need to have a posse with him at all times when I am all anyone needs for any mission.

So what is the mission and how do I know it will start with the limey bastard Prince Georgie getting plastered on Red Bull Vodkas and pints of Lager from the Big Jugs across the street? How do I know that it will end with the salvation of America and the destruction of the radical Islamic terrorists who live next door to me in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania? I know all of this because I am Jeremiah Stumpf, the Prophet of Doom.

That’s what Georgie calls me and I like it because he is the only one of my friends who recognizes the biblical significance of my name, the reference to the Prophet Jeremiah who warned of and predicted the destruction of Jerusalem in Jeremiah 37:7. He has since created variations on the name, like G&D for Gloom and Doom, and Babyloincloth which is a play on Babylon, the place where the Jews were taken as slaves. Like my namesake, I have been a lone voice crying in the darkness, predicting the destruction of the United States and the enslavement of its people if something doesn’t happen soon to prevent it. But that’s where the similarities end. I’ve never worn a yoke, and the gloom and doom stuff is bogus, made up by Georgie and his alcoholic sense of humor. Ask anyone else who knows me and they’ll tell you that I’m one of the most upbeat people you’ll ever meet, especially if you consider I’m dying.

Oh sure, my doctors think I’m crazy, but they’ll say whatever the drug companies pay them to say. They are puppets dangling from corporate puppet master strings. They’ve also told me that I’m paranoid on several occasions, but so would anyone who lies about sharing your confidential medical data with government lackeys.

“Ready, mate?”

So I’m here now with Georgie who flew in from Gatwick seven days ago, and it has taken me this long to realize that he is trying to kill me with drugs and booze. He even said, “Mate, I’m going to kill you with drugs and booze, roight, roight, roight!” and I know he meant it because he’s British. At least that’s what I think he said, because he’s very hard to understand. He said it two nights ago when he was so drunk he passed out on my couch with a burning candle in his lap because he thought he was a Druid or something. He nearly burned down the fucking house with one of those scented green, minty, fruity kind of candles that come with a dish that the corporate puppet masters at Blood Bath and Beyond make you buy using subliminal messages buried in those humongous blue and white 20% off coupons they never tire of sending everyone. WTF?! I mean, really.

Georgie is staying here because Justin signed us up for AirBnb. Georgie’s rent will help finance the mission, plus Justin said we needed someone British on our crew to give it a “touch of Anglican civility and class,” whatever that means. If you want to know what Georgie looks like, think of a British soccer hooligan, and that’s him. If I had to describe him to a police sketch artist, I could say he has brown, thinning hair that he styles like Mr. Heat Miser, has cat-like eyes, is six feet tall, weighs about two bills, and loves to wear denim, but all of these would fall short. If I say he looks like a soccer hooligan, it pretty much describes him no matter what image the term soccer hooligan puts in a person’s head. That is Georgie.

Of course whenever I call him a hooligan, he gets all bent out of shape and says, “Mate, what about you, eh? Roight! Roight! Roight!” or something like that, because I honestly don’t know what he’s saying half the time. He tells me I look like I should be running out of the Scottish Highlands in a kilt and swinging a spiked mace and battle axe. I am an imposing figure, especially when I want to be. I keep my head shaved clean and my reddish-orange goatee thick and trimmed. I have a gut now, which sucks, but I still have cannons strapped to these arms, as well as powerful legs that can still squat five hundred. There aren’t many database administrators who are as huge or cock diesel as me, so a lot of people at work keep their distance, not that I mind. I don’t need any work buddies or chicken vindaloo take-out lunch dates with the Bangalore job stealers or any shit like that. I just need a cube with high walls, a set of Bose headphones, three L.E.D. monitors, and to be left A.L.O.N.E.

The kitchen is Trashed Beyond All Get-all (TBAGed), and on the counter are three empty cases of beer (Georgie drank most of them), a dozen empty Red Bull cans, two empty bottles of vodka (him again), one of Sapphire gin, a bottle of Myer’s Rum now being used as an ashtray, an empty liter and a half of Captain Morgan’s, an empty fifth of 18 year-old Macallan he bought to remind him of home, his vaporizer and cannabis oil, ten tiny Ziploc bags long since snorted empty, ripped open, and sucked dry, and twelve empty whipped-cream cans that got him high one awful night when he ran out of everything else. When we asked for someone British, we had no idea we were getting the Exile on Main St. version of Keith Richards.

Georgie opens the freezer door with enough force to knock most of the snapshots and letter-magnet fasteners off the front, magnets that had been arranged into sentences like “JUSTIN IS DA MAN” and “THE END IS NEIGH.” He grabs a handful of ice, slams the door shut, creating another avalanche of photographs and magnet fasteners, and gives me my drinking tip for the day.

“Now, the thing ya gotta do,” he says, “is to chug the whole thing down. No stopping. Just chug, good and proper.”
I don’t know how many times I have to tell him that I don’t drink.

He takes the last two pint glasses from the cupboard, fills them to the rims with vodka, and adds a splash of Red Bull to top them off.

“Dude, I don’t drink.”

“Come on, G&D, Old Boy,” he says. “It’s a state of mind.” He widens his eyes and flashes a toothy grin. “Now here we go. Ready? Boi!”

He throws back his drink and I’ve never seen anyone drink anything so fast. When he finishes, he pounds mine like it’s nothing.

He laughs. “You Am-air-icans,” he says in a way that tells me all Americans sound like Bugs Bunny to him. “I thought you boys could drink. What’s a matter?”

“Don’t say that, bro.”

“What, mate?”

“That, bro.”

“What are you talking about, mate?”

“That thing about America, bro.”

“Seriously, mate?”

“Seriously.”

I hate that shit. Everyone loves taking cheap shots at the U.S.A., especially Europeans who should be polishing our red, white, and blue asses with their lips until they can see their reflections. It’s OK because Georgie hates Europeans even more than I do. I’ve learned that the British don’t even consider themselves European, and I can’t say I blame them. I’m pretty sure he hates Muslims as much as me and Justin, but I have no proof, just a vibe I get. I’ll have to find out for sure.

“Relax, mate,” he says.

“Sure, I’ll relax, as soon as you guys pay up for the Lend-Lease Act.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you Brits don’t like being reminded of that.”

“Fuck if I know what you’re going on about. Here, have another drink.”

He pours another Red Bull and vodka and slides it down the counter toward me. I catch it just as it goes off the edge.

“You looked like Clint Eastwood when you did that,” he says. “You’re Jerry Eastwood, that’s what you are.” He stands up on a kitchen chair. “Today, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jeremiah Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Fucked.”

He laughs as his foot breaks through the wicker mesh of the seat, and he topples over. He gets up and sets both glasses on the counter and opens a fresh can of Red Bull and acts like falling backwards into a trashcan with your leg through a chair is the most natural thing in the world.

“Give me some of that,” I say.

“What, just Red Bull?”

“Give me it.”

He hands me the can and I take a long swallow.

“That Red Bull’s good stuff,” he says. “Especially when you’re out late night at the boozer and you need a little something to sort you out right. It’s really nice.”

“I don’t poison my mind, and I don’t poison my body either.”

I get a sideways look. “Buddy, it’s not poison. It’s a state of mind. You’re The Prophet and you’re not understanding your own prophecy. But you should know mine, I reckon. Why did I get set up with the only American who doesn’t drink?”

He stands again on a second chair and attacks AirBnB, and I think the internet. He speaks with a lot of quick jerks of his hand that send a lot of RBV onto my floor.

“You Americans can’t drink and get shite for vacation,” he says. “You’re probably working today even.”

“From home.”

“You’ve worked from home every day I’ve been here.”

I do work from home most days. Everyone else at work gets to work from home one day a week, but my manager told me I can work from home as many days as I want, and I do take full advantage. It just goes to show what perks await you in the workplace if you command respect.

“I have one conference call with Mark Cancer—

“With who?”

“My boss, Mark Prancer, who I call Mark Cancer because he’s a cancer on the face of our company.”

“I can only imagine.”

“Then I have to apply database scripts for our production rollout.” Total bullshit. I have no intention of doing any of it. Today is for my real work. “Other than that I’m free. I want to take you to Big Jugs for lunch because I want to talk to you about something important.”

“Big Jugs sounds well good, but don’t kid yourself about doing work. Every time I see you you’re surfing the web.”

I don’t want to work today, and I’m not going to work today, but I still have to make it look like I am. The Fed is trying to bring about a currency crisis that will utterly destroy the United States’ economy by the end of this year. It’s a certainty, so any work I do is futile. Despite this, it is still important that I bill for the work they think I’m doing so I can get paid so I can buy stuff to keep the economy going until the end. That’s Capitalism 101.

If only other people feel the way I do. As Paul Ronsen said, “Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t tried it, and that stinks.” Still, it is the unknown ideal, not that any other country knows it. No other people understand the American work ethic, especially those Brits who get six months of vacation per year. But I guess I’d take that much vacation too if I could coast in the wake of the world’s only superpower. The only person who’s not a native-born American who understands the American work ethic is my Chinese neighbor, Wang, who lives in the house opposite mine. People always think I’m joking when I say this, but the guy’s name is Wang Chung, like in that song, and they always start singing it when I tell them his name. People are so predictable and boring. I think I hear Wang out front mowing the lawn right now. The guy has something like fifty different jobs and he owns a lawn cutting service, a dry cleaning delivery service, and a pizza delivery service named Pizza Long Time. He works even more than I do. Not too shabby, considering he’s a commie. I’ve been keeping an eye on his communist ass, which isn’t hard because he’s everywhere I look doing one odd job or another (at least now I know where that Chinese dude in Goldfinger got his name). I sense that all of Wang’s jobs are just a cover for something that I haven’t figured out yet.

I say all this to Georgie, but he calls me a racist. That Brit doesn’t know me. If he did he’d know that I am the least racist person on earth.

There’s a sound underneath Georgie’s politically correct yammering, something far off.

“Do you hear that?” I ask.

“Hear what?”

“Shhh!”

I hold my hand up to him to quiet him down, but it doesn’t work.

“Hear what?”

I walk toward the dining room window.

“It’s like a low hum,” I say.

“A what?”

“Shhh!”

“Stop shushing me, mate. It’s not polite—not that politesse is the forte of you Am-air-icans.”

“I told you to watch that.”

“The only thing you’ll be watching is me pouring you another vodka-laced masterpiece.”

“I don’t drink.”

I hear another sound much closer—the buzzing of my phone in my pocket. I have a text from a number I don’t recognize, a one liner:

“Come on,” Georgie whines. “I flew six hours to get here. Plus, you said your house was ‘right around the corner’ from Eighteenth Street Lounge. Not only are you not in any kind of city, but ESO is in Washington D.C.”

“D.C. is right around the corner by American standards. It’s only two and a half hours on the Megabus.”

“For shite! You’re a bunch of liars.”

“It’s not my fault you don’t even know what city your favorite music place is in. That music sucks anyway, you should be thanking me.”

“That music’s well good. It gets into you, you know?” He stares down at the floor and then back at me. “The least you can do is drink with me today.” He lights up a cigarette and offers me the pack. I don’t take it because I quit yesterday. “Come on,” he says. “It’s like it’s always been. The UK and the USA. WWI, WWII, Iraq—we’ve been brothers in arms for a hundred years. Now have a little something lovely with me.”

That’s what I wanted to hear. Brothers in arms. Little does he know how right he is. We’re going to go next door tonight, and like Marlon Brando said in my favorite movie, we’re going to initiate plan “Exterminate them all!”

My phone buzzes again with an inbound text from that same number.

Whoever this is likes games. I’ll play along

          

A minute goes by.

     

No one who knows me would send me a text like this. This person definitely likes games. I like games too, the first-person shooter kind.