Jack Acid, Freelance Priest

By Miracle Jones

The day I met Jack Acid was one of those days when I was sure everybody was secretly working for The Man. Maybe not even secretly. Maybe they were all wearing cinnamon-scented “The Man” Underroos, and I just didn’t get the memo. I was marked, like a terrier’s favorite light-post, and it seemed every bastard I met that day could smell the subterfuge and clueless opposition in my rotten Jockeys.

Ultimately, in retrospect, everything turned out for the best. But that day was probably the closest I ever came to taking the NRA up on their standing philosophical proposition and purchasing an automatic weapon. I think I would have tried to rob the police station. “Give me all your justice,” I would have said, “In small, unmarked ballistic packages.” Self-inflicted suicide is so desperate - and I think there must be a certain level of cool in showing up in Heaven riddled with police slugs. Surely “hail of gunfire” deaths get their own wing or something away from the apathetic masses, right next to the “burned up in re-entry” folks.

But this story isn’t about my woes, particularly, so let me just give you a quick rundown of where I stood before I get on with the meat and potatoes of this first attempt at chronicling what my life has now become.

1) I awaken to the insufferable, psychotic whine of my landlord informing me that I have been evicted for weeks now, and what-the-hell-am-I-still-doing-sleeping-in-His-precious-shithole-of-an-efficiency-apartment. Fair enough. I just can’t quite handle the idea of being homeless yet. It’s like when an amputee’s missing leg begins to itch.

2) The library, where I spend most of my days and nights, engaging in what I call “research” and what the rest of the world calls “evading responsibility,” informs me that, due to a new municipal policy and budget restrictions, the library will now only be open every other day and close at 5 PM, placing more of an emphasis on circulation, and no longer stooping to babysit society’s dysfunctional, schizotypal cynics. Fuck.

3) For some unaccountable reason or another, somebody has checked out everything P.G. Wodehouse ever wrote. Even the book that I was reading and hid in the toilet paper dispenser in the third floor bathroom. I become convinced a conspiracy against me is brewing. Now it will be months before I figure out whether or not the invincible Jeeves has gotten Bertie Wooster out of another unfortunate marriage proposal. I curse out loud, and William T. Crewcut, jabbering into a cell-phone and wearing an orange t-shirt proclaiming allegiance to some sort of prepositional Christ organization, gives me the eye. I hate that.

4) An e-mail from Gourmet Skin magazine announces their insolvency, and offers a sad letter of condolence to all its writers who it now cannot pay due to an increasing proliferation of free internet porn and the effective death of the printed pornographic word. It is possible that I am qualified to do something other than write for the cum-rag press, but then again, it is possible that I am not. Best of luck, say the conveniently bankrupt editors of GS. I consider hiring a lawyer, and then I remember that I already owe Satan a favor or two, myself.

5) No more 99 cent value menu at Wendy’s.

6) As I am walking down Guadalupe, trying to figure out where I stand karmically, and whether or not faking a British accent will increase my chances of getting a small business loan, an exasperated mother and a goggle-eyed, ice-cream clad toddler (my supernatural stain sense tells me it’s vanilla) come bounding out of one of the numerous, forgettable clothing shops that festoon what used to be The Drag. I give the kid my best smile, and with a prestidigitational flourish, remove my thumb to amuse his no-doubt heavily refined sense of the joyfully grotesque. The kid actually begins to cry. His mother grabs his sticky hand, and yanks him in the opposite direction. Man, I love kids...and damned if they don’t 99.9% of the time love me back. Due to our synchronous maturity level, we usually get along great. Therefore, to ease my ego, and because it has been days since I have bathed, I assume I must smell something awful. Leprous-rainy-day-cottage-cheese-feet awful. Still, this particular cosmic brick-in-the-teeth bums me out maybe more than anything else.

So there I was - homeless, jobless, hungry, intellectually unsatisfied, without a friend in the world, and feeling utterly, utterly wretched. And then, to top off my proverbial mug of poison Guinness, as I sat in front of the post office, waiting for the mail and (hopefully) answers to my weekly fiction queries, who should chance to come walking by but Her. And She was with Him. The Two of them Together, only Tongues apart, and glowing like the finest Couple ever to walk the fallen, corruptible world.

I would like to say I kept my cool. I would like to say I nodded my head slightly, gave them a cool slit-eyed stare, and went back to chatting up the passers by. I would like to say a lot of noble things about myself, but that day was not to be denied the full run of its wrath, and what actually happened fills me now with irreducible shame. I am only human. And when I get angry, I get creative.

Let me just say that it was a private moment of ignominy, there was much unpleasantness, and all of us - myself, Her, Him, Johnny Law, that sweet old lady collecting for charity, the United States Postal Service, the Texas State School for the Deaf, and many of the finest words in the Webster’s dictionary - are past that particular point in our lives. I forgive myself, but it was not pretty. After collecting my pants and proving to the beat cop that I was not in fact on PCP, I was sent on my way with a warning, having not technically done anything illegal. Not technically, not in Austin. The cop took pity on me, I now realize. She, however, never looked back.

And that was when Fate would decide that I had suffered enough. That was when a dark wind would blow the weathervane-thin indicator of my attention in an entirely new direction. That was when I saw the flyer that would lead me to Jack Acid.

It caught my eye out of nowhere, pasted sideways across one of those public forum posts between a band poster (“Bloody Stool” opening for “Abraded Elbow Lesion”) and an open proclamation to the world that Socialism is the answer to all manifest problems. The flyer must have been a month old. I couldn’t read the bottom half, as it was obscured by a pathetic looking picture of a lost dachshund, but the top half was enough to hijack my self-pity and get me curious. I looked to see if anyone else was watching, and then snapped it off with a quick flick of my wrist to get a better look. It was pretty grimy. In faded gold-leaf lettering on a baby-blue background were the words: ROOMMATE NEEDED. FREE RENT. NO CATCH. NO SHIT. I AM LOOKING FOR ONE IN A MILLION - I AM LOOKING FOR A MIRACLE.

There were slots for toothy little tags on which one would ordinarily find a phone number, but no tags left.

“Too bad,” I said to myself, looking for a trash can to toss it into. “This almost looks legit.” It couldn’t have been advertising. There was no hook.

I began to get the unmistakable prickly feeling of being watched. I spun around in the air, expecting a pickpocket. I was wrong. Standing there, staring at me, and then laughing at me, was a sight for the sorest eyes this side of an Antarctic snow storm.

“Zeke!”

“Mr. Jones, I presume.”

A seven-foot tall, bespectacled man wearing a T-shirt that says “God used to be my co-pilot, but then we crashed in the mountains of Nepal and I was forced to eat him” can’t help but make you smile. Plus, Ezekiel Sandoz and I grew up together. We met in fifth grade when I kicked the everloving crap out of Elliot Michaels one day in computer lab for making fun of him past all reason. He just wouldn’t shut up about Zeke being a character on the Oregon Trail – “You got snakebit, Zeke” “Zeke, you died of a broken leg” - and it had really started to annoy me. It eventually came to a head, I had to fight him, and even though I got my nose broken and lost the respect of almost every girl in the neighborhood who thought I was a sweet elementary school innocent, I won a friend for life.

We got along great back then, and we still do. Zeke has an incredibly religious, slightly insane family and I don’t have one to speak of at all, so we compromised. I occasionally got a Christmas, and he occasionally got drugs and laid. Eventually, Zeke hit a late puberty, where he rocketed up from the ground like some sort of experimental genetically-modified oak, and I still reap the benefits of intimidating protection from time to time. Inside both of our minds, though, he is still shorter than I am.

The last time I had seen him was at his graduation. He was now working on his PhD in Philosophy, and didn’t have as much time for kicks and hijinks.

“Homeless again, Jones?” said Zeke.

“You know it. Hey, you remember that time we went around and tried to painstakingly turn every speed-limit sign in Austin that had a 3 on it into an 8? I was just thinking about that the other day. We got greedy. We should have just made 2s into 3s. Nobody would even have noticed.”

“Yeah, but where would be the radically empty symbolic gesture there?” said Zeke, grinning.

“It’s a fine line, to be sure,” I said.

Zeke picked me up in a bone crushing bear-hug, and then set me back down, where I could recuperate and pop back together my telescoped joints. Sucker-punch style, he snatched the flier out of my hand as I stretched, examined it like it was a rat turd in a jar of peanut butter, and then began to fumble around in his disproportionately tiny wallet with his huge, rough hands. He looked like the most gigantic little old lady ever. I think I even heard him cluck his tongue.

“Hmmm...yes...I know it’s in here somewhere. I have a present for you, you runty little white man. As I approached, I saw you staring at that roommate-wanted sign there like it was a 6-month Papal indulgence, and it occurred to me that I have the missing piece of your puzzle. I found it glommed onto the bottom of my shoe the other day, and I kept it because it seemed so odd. I thought it might come in handy. This is what you might call an outstanding, improbable coincidence.”

“You know me, Zeke. ‘Improbable Coincidence’ is stenciled on the underside of each of my eyelids.”

He grunted in satisfaction and amazingly pulled out one of the flier’s mislaid tag incisors. It was the same unusual shade of blue, and had the same gold-leaf writing. I tried to match it up with the tear-marks, and found that it had come from the very last slot on the left. Bafflingly, it read: YOUR PHONE NUMBER IS 555 - 0121. GET READY TO BE SHOCKED.

“It’s certainly not my phone number,” said Zeke. “I thought it was just a reject from the shittiest fortune cookie company ever.”

The payphone behind us began to ring. Zeke and I looked at each other. A ringing unattended payphone is spy movie fodder. My brain began to tingle. I leaned over to check, and sure enough, the payphone’s number was 555 - 0121. Perhaps things were looking up.

“Better answer it,” said Zeke. “I’m late for class, and if I remember correctly, the last time I got involved in one of your irresponsible forays into the outer darkness, we both got arrested. I think I still have community service hours to do. Let me know how it all works out.”

He took off, leaving me to my enlightenment. I watched him leave - slightly frustrated. I kind of wanted him to buy me lunch. But he knew my weakness.

I picked up the handset.

“Hello? If this is James Bond, let me just say I think you are a lackluster authoritarian toad.”

“You must be my miracle,” said the voice at the other end. It was smooth, and sedate. Clipped, yet almost catatonically calm. I started to respond, but I was cut off. “In polite society, my name is Jonathan Acid. But my friends call me Jack. As in Kennedy, or Ing Off. Since we are now formally introduced, I need you to first do a favor for me, and then we will discuss my needs and how we are going to decorate.”

“Hold on,” I said, “Just to get things straight. This is about the free room, right? What’s with the elaborately cryptic escapade here? Am I bugged?”

“Don’t bother thinking about how this is all happening right now. I’ll explain later, when time is not so pressing a concern. What I need you to do presently, is to go as fast as you can to the corner of 29th and Guadalupe, behind the vendors and fronts. There you will find a gigantic, peach-colored dumpster, locked and latched. You will also find a bolt cutter underneath a big bag of Crunchee-Tatums Ketchup Flavored Potato Crisps. Cut those locks, pocket them, and get inside the dumpster. Sit quietly, stay attentive, and I will be along shortly to fill you in further. I know this is odd, but if you can’t handle it, let me know now. It’s a good sign that you haven’t hung up so far, but most people can’t stomach this much of a deviation from consensus, normative situations. You will be breaking the law, and I need to know the level of complicity with which you are comfortable. You picked a good day, my friend...this may be our last chance.”

What did I have to lose? I started to say something witty, like “Buddy, I think you may just be the answer to every one of my fictional prayers,” or “I was born illegitimate, and I’ve been trying to top it ever since,” but instead I just said, “I’m on my way,” and hung up. This was cool as a porno popsicle, and I could play all day.

I turned up my collar and sleazed my way to the given location as fast as I could. I got a lot of blank stares. Sometimes I like to pretend I am in a zombie movie and people are very slowly trying to eat my brains. Based on the way I feel every morning when the sun hits my eyeballs, I think they may just get a chunk or two while I am asleep. Today, however, I moved through the streets like a svelte, high-octane, feline slinking machine, and I was even fairly certain I wasn’t being followed.

The dumpster was right where Jack had said it would be. This was, I must say, a classy dumpster. It was more like a trash utility shed. It had four walls, was big enough to fit a van inside, and even seemed to be insulated. I could understand why it had locks on it - any self-respecting member of the vagrant persuasion would be more than happy to hole up here and perform their various drug related rituals free from the inclement elements and the prying eyes of justice.

I looked for the bag of ketchup chips, found it, removed the bolt cutters, and pocketed them. I circled the shed to make sure there was no one hiding behind it, or that none of the employees of the surrounding shops and restaurants were taking advantage of its concealing size to cadge a quick smoke or a grope. Satisfied, I whipped out the cutters, and snipped off the locks. I picked them up from where they fell clanking to the concrete and stowed them in my jeans.

The dumpster was almost empty. There was a single Hefty sack in one of the corners, and a soggy pile of old newspapers. I thought it would be dark and I would have insects and rats to contend with, but instead light poured through a huge hole in the ceiling, a result of what looked to be some sort of chemical corrosion. The edges of the hole were sharp and irregular, and looked chewed.

I sat down on the stack of newspapers and began once more to examine the mystery flier and its corresponding tag.

In the direct sunlight, I noticed something strange. Attached to the top of the flier by a piece of clear tape was an almost invisible, razor-thin strand of anomalous fiber. When I had grabbed the flier so hastily, I must have snapped it off of whatever it was attached to, because I could tell by the ragged end that it had led somewhere. Curiouser and curiouser.

A knock at the door interrupted my inspections and cogitations. I wasn’t sure whether to answer it or not. Before I could make up my mind, my problem was solved for me. In walked the man who could only be Jack Acid. Only this person could match the name and that laconic, hypnotic, narcotic of a voice.

“Hello, hello,” said Jack. He was roughly my age and height, and we shared the same build, but the similarities stopped there. He was dressed in a bright pink, almost fluorescent, three-piece suit. In lieu of a necktie, he wore a slender piece of mirror around his neck that gave the appearance of a tie quite convincingly until you looked at it twice and saw yourself looking back. His features were fine and thin, childlike without being pretty or dainty. His hair was shoulder length - dyed blue - and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a week or so. He took lanky to a new extreme, but the way he moved, it was as if he was poured like olive oil into the space he would occupy in each subsequent passing moment. The closest analogue I can come up with is that he moved the way professionals - real professionals - have sex. He had grace. I liked him.

I offered my hand to shake. He put a sandwich into it.

“I got you some calories. Eat, and I’ll explain. We don’t have much time, but there is a minimum amount of information that must be conveyed to you to keep your head above water.”

He shut the door behind him. I began to eat. Can you blame me? I suppose it could have been poisoned, but as I said, I liked the guy.

“Alright...I’ll keep it simple, citizen,” said Jack. “This is our new digs. Not this particular dumpster precisely, but at least the same model. We are going to get a new one, untainted by the soiled remains of civilized waste. Brass tacks: we are about to engage in a felony of epic ...well semi-epic, anyway... proportions. Criminal Mischief 6703: Theft of a Municipal Trash Receptacle. But don’t feel too bad about it. As you can see...” He pointed with his pinky to the hole in the ceiling. “This particular trash receptacle is no longer functional, and is therefore slated for removal, post-haste. Do you know what they do with dumpsters when they no longer work, my friend?”

“No. What?”

“They throw them away. And we are merely going to benefit, parasitically, from their absurd insistence on cosmetic virtue.”

“How convenient.”

“Not really...the hole was my doing. Easy as squirtable cheese. Now, pay attention! In approximately...” he pulled back his sleeve and revealed a Felix-the-Cat wristwatch. The eyes even moved. I suppressed a giggle. “...seven minutes, the two gentlemen charged with removing and replacing this particular trash receptacle will be arriving. Follow my lead. I don’t have much of a plan, because I like to stay open to the flexibility of improvisation, but the ultimate goal is to catch them by surprise, render them insensible, and abscond with their delivery. These two fellows are not the brightest neon in the beer sign, but they do have size on us, so it may be tricky. Especially since, due to certain moral decalogues to which I must adhere, I will not be able to do anything violent.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Just pretend I’m your grandmother,” he said.

“They say my Nana was a teamster.”

“Yeah, well. I just can’t. There’s no time to get into it.”

“Fair enough. The name’s Jones, by the way.”

“First or last?”

I shrugged.

“Boring. I shall, of course, call you Miracle. It’s only natural. That is what I requested, and that is what you have become. So what do you do Miracle?”

“I write. Oh yeah, and sometimes I agitate for social justice. Hey, listen won’t they come looking for our stolen little hideaway when they realize it’s been snatched?”

“Certainly not. They will be much too embarrassed. They’ll simply bring another one. The city has a trash budget that could take care of the homeless problem tomorrow. We will park our new home somewhere out of the loop, and defend it with wits and class.”

I finished my sandwich, impressed. Something was still bothering me, though.

“So how’d you know you’d find somebody to help you today? Seems a bit reckless. And what makes you think I would be into living in a dumpster with you, buddy?”

“Who wouldn’t be? And it wasn’t really that reckless, actually. I’ve been changing the locks on this dumpster every day for weeks now. When that doesn’t work, I slash tires...falsify documents...make prank phone calls. Anything to stall until I found the right muscle. Being a monkeywrench to the bureaucracy machine is like being a window washer at NORAD. Easy. If you truly hate the system as much as I do, you’re in luck, because it’s just so mindless to manipulate. They keep showing up and going back to the station, and they get paid either way. And to answer your second question further, you are the only one who has responded with anything like enthusiasm to my little interview. The flier you took was connected to a small radio transmitter hidden inside the hollow poster pylon that alerted me whenever the flier was jostled by the violence of someone, say, pulling off one of the tags. You evidently pulled off the whole damn flier. Look, when I said I needed a roommate, I was holding back a bit. What I really need is actually something much more difficult to find. And I always trust in coincidence and synchronicity to do my dirty work. What I really need is...”

Without warning, the door opened up, catching us off guard. The garbagemen were early. While talking, we hadn’t heard them creep up on us. Two bowlegged men in matching brown jumpsuits stood there with wide ovals of shock on their pusses, staring at me and my sandwich, and Jack and his suit. However, when they regained their composure, they were majorly...nay, royally...pissed off. I got the impression they had been waiting to find out who had been messing with their schedule for weeks now, and were very excited about turning that person into something prone and twitching. However, it had been a world-record bad day for me, and they had interrupted my new friend in the middle of what could potentially be some sort of startling revelation. Did I mention I’m just a bit psychotic? With a right cross, and then a follow-up blow to the stomach to get him low enough for an uppercut (which I delivered with utter grace), I felled the first one, and then used his body to knock the other one down. I gave the second guy a pulled kick to the head, and he joined his chum in the magic land of dreams and swirls. No big thing. Zeke would have scoffed: they were certainly no Elliot Michaels.

Immediately, Jack bent down and checked their pulses.

“Excellent. Good discipline. Their injuries will be minor.” After inspecting them, Jack looked a little green.

I grabbed their truck keys. “Alright, Mr. Jack Acid. I’ll help you steal this dumpster. But as far as being your new roommate, we’ll have to see. I, too, like to stay open to the flexibility of improvisation.”

Jack smiled for the first time. “We won’t be stealing their truck for good,” said Jack, “And we don’t want to get the police involved, so we must bring it right back here as soon as we take this dumpster to where we need it. I have the perfect place in mind. Let’s really hurry, though, before they awaken.”

I put my foot on the truck’s sideboard, ready to climb up. Jack had stopped, and was looking at me with new eyes. I noticed for the first time that he had my copy of Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves tucked under his arm. I was not surprised.

“Miracle, I was going to say, what I really need is a partner.”