Jack Acid, Freelance Priest

by Miracle Jones

Senator Larry Kelly woke up twice in the middle of the night to take an enormous bowel movement. It was inexplicable. What couldn’t you get out of your system with one heroic push? The THIRD time he woke up with the quaking in his gut, he tossed the covers aside and addressed his new young wife with the same blustery voice he used in front of the C-SPAN cameras:

“Honey, it appears that I -- a man with few flaws but much character -- have contracted something in my belly that is determined to have its way with me. I know that it has been written that I am a portly, flabby man -- but this is just ridiculous. What did we even eat last night?”

Mrs. Kelly didn’t answer, because she was still asleep. In fact, Mrs. Kelly was medically catatonic. The servant who had brought her nightly cup of wine had slipped a fairly powerful pharmaceutical-grade sedative into her glass, and by this point, Mrs. Kelly was feeling no pain. Was the servant paid off by a shadowy cabal of political enemies? Held at knifepoint by terrorists from someplace hot?

Heck no – the servant did it for free, and was GLAD to do it. Said the missus liked sedatives with her wine anyway. The servant liked it when the missus was doped and in a good mood in the morning after a full rest. Said the missus wouldn’t remember who had put the pill in the wine. Wouldn’t even notice. Pills and wine were The Way It Was for young Mrs. Kelly. The servant just giggled toothlessly. Cryptically. It was a little bit strange.

For the record:

The night before, the Kellys had eaten roast pigling á jus, pickled lasagna with grated dronchella root, and a side of sassafras-garbanzo pudding at one of North Dakota’s premier four star restaurants. In fact, it might have been North Dakota’s only four star restaurant. They had been celebrating another victory over the encroaching liberal hordes in the last election. Senator Kelly himself had not been up for reelection, but it was always expedient to show one’s support for the young puppies in the party. When puppies got older, they liked to eat from the big dog’s bowl. One had to make sure they had the proper fear and respect before their balls started dragging the grass.

Senator Kelly heaved his legs over the side of the bed and hurled himself to the floor. He pounded down the long hallway to his shimmering, silvery, peaches-and-cream colored bathroom and busted inside with his shoulder to the door.

He sat down hard on the squatter, his pajama bottoms falling from his thighslabs at the slightest twitch of his back muscles. He grunted; he sweated; he breathed easier. He drowned a quadriplegic dachshund. He gave birth to a cop with tangled warts. He tossed the Captain overboard, bound and gagged in a speckled burlap sack.

Suddenly, Senator Kelly realized that he was sitting in the dark. He reached over from the toilet and fumbled his hand along the wall. He found the switch and mashed it with a palm the size of a dinner plate.

The lights flickered on.

There were two strange men standing quietly inside Senator Larry Kelly’s bathtub.

“Wow,” said one of them, a short, twitchy looking fellow with manic-kinetic eyes and little yellow teeth that appeared to be naturally sharp. He was wearing ratty clothes that made him look like the central pole of a circus tent. His head was planted with brown stubble, and he looked like the sort of person who could never, ever stop moving. “They always look different in person, don’t they?”

“Natch,” said the man next to him. He had pink hair and was wearing a full-three piece suit. He wore pink leather gloves up to his elbows to match his spiky head. He was holding a syringe.

He looked like a nice guy, all things considered. Good eyes. Balanced.

Still, Senator Kelly had to start screaming. What would you do?

The short twitchy guy leapt out of the bathtub and started strapping Senator Kelly to his toilet with duct tape. There was a handful of gauze for his mouth. Senator Kelly tried to struggle, but the twitchy guy was everywhere. He had octopus steel for arms. He maneuvered in the cramped confines of the peach-colored bathroom like a squirrel in a chestnut tree, faster than crawdaddies burrow into the mud. Faster than an unplugged jugful of lightning. He was fearsome in his intensity; masterful in his precision; and a force that seemed inhuman in design and circumstance.

Woe, thy name is Miracle Jones!

(“What the hell is all this bullshit?” asked Jack. “The guy just sat there pissing himself while you tied him up. And you did a pretty half-assed job, anyway.”

“It’s my story,” I said. “And I say I was fearsome, masterful, and inhuman.”

“This is why writers never have girlfriends,” said Jack.)

The two uninvited gentlemen sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched the Senator gasp and flail. No one came to his rescue. The house was as silent as a dead submarine crushed to the bottom of an accidental iceberg.

“Hello,” said the man with the pink hair. “My name is Jack, and we are here to cure AIDS.”

Senator Kelly just whimpered.

“I know what you are thinking. How are we going to cure AIDS by taking a United States Senator hostage and forcing him to listen to a lecture in his own bathroom at four in the morning? Are we going to take you on a magical journey through space and time and force you to repent your callous ways?”

Senator Kelly cocked his head to the side.

“It’s not going to be that easy, I’m afraid,” continued Jack. “It won’t be easy for us in the next ten minutes, and it won’t be easy for you for the rest of your life. Some people think you can learn empathy. But I am smarter than that. You have to make empathy. Or at least make room for it. Like the emetic we put in your lasagna has made room inside your distended gut and brought you here to us -- right on time.”

Senator Kelly’s eyes flitted back and forth between the twitcher and the grinner. He could find no purchase; no pity; no weakness or sense of transgression. No remorse.

“Would you believe you aren’t the first Senator whose home we have broken into?” said the twitchy guy, grinning. “You are lucky number 11. We hit North Dakota number 2 tomorrow.”

“Sad, but true,” said Jack. “You guys need better security. Or maybe you need to hire guards that don’t have sisters and cousins with the disease. They have a hard time seeing us, if you know what I mean. Too busy thinking about all of those medical bills. That life of permanent cocktails and fear.”

“We’re all gonna die,” said King Spazz. “But it’s nice not to know when or how.”

Senator Kelly’s eyes rolled back in his head, and white spittle sprayed out from behind the gauze and tape.

“Relax,” said Jack. “We aren’t going to kill you tonight. Don’t you think you would have read about it in the papers if there were a couple of psychos out there bumping off senators?’

Senator Kelly seemed to relax a little bit.

“We aren’t going to kill you. We are just going to pump a few milliliters of AIDS infected blood into your heart. We are just going to make your clock tick a little bit faster.”

Jack squirted a bit of blood into the sink from the syringe. Senator Kelly started to buck and squeal, but the tape held fast.

“See, we’ve been thinking about it,” said Jack. “And we are pretty much convinced that it is not in the best interest of the people in power to do anything about AIDS as far as working toward a long term cure. You guys only fuck each other, so the disease never flares up inside your incestuous Washington circle. The disease is something that only hits gays and poor people and foreigners. Why should you give a crap? What incentive do you have to bang out a cure for the rest of us? You are pretty much on record as hating gays, and foreigners, and poor people. You think the disease is something they deserve. Something that their culture and way of life has bred in order to thin out the herd. I don’t know if you are right or wrong, but I do know that you are about to contract the HIV virus. Not from a heroin needle or a transvestite or a Kalahari bushman. From me. And my little needle. And then, after you are done being pissed and scared and raw and wronged, I think you are going to think twice about diverting funds from AIDS research into military and industrial concerns. I think you are going to be thinking about the problem of AIDS quite a bit, no matter what happens to us.”

“We don’t expect to get caught, either,” said twitchy. “In fact, this is something of a summer vacation for us. I’ve personally always wanted to see the auspicious capitals of the fifty fine United States.”

“Hawaii is gorgeous, by the way,” said Jack. “If one of your lobbyists ever offers you a package deal, TAKE IT. Man, those beaches. I thought it just looked that way in magazines.”

Senator Kelly hunched over on the toilet, his chest fat doubled up against his pillow knees. His face had turned a strangled purple, and he kept looking at the door as if expecting someone to come in and save him.

“Pin his arms back, Jones,” said Jack.

Jones did as he was told. Jack stuck the needle into Senator Kelly’s flaccid, mottled bicep and depressed the plunger. At first it looked like Senator Kelly was going to die right there from fright and shame. But then gradually his eyes relaxed and he sank into a glazed stupor.

“Dr. Xu certainly does a fine job with his racks and scales,” said Jack. “I thought for sure we were going to have to give this guy a double dose, but it looks like the mixture of blood and morphine was just right.”

“He’s not gonna explode or nothing?” said Jones.

“Nah, he’s gonna feel great for the next couple of hours. Aren’t you buddy?”

Jones bent down and tore the piece of tape from the Senator’s mouth. He went ahead and cut the other restraints as well. As a team, Jack and Jones lifted the beast of a man and put him inside the bathtub.

“If they test you, they are going to find a pretty hefty amount of heroin in your system along with the HIV,” said Jack. “I guess you could tell people you got AIDS from two strange men in the middle of the night, but people are going to hear something different when you tell them that. You could try and track us down and get your revenge, but let me just say that several of your colleagues have spent a sizable fortune trying to get a hold of us in the past couple of weeks, and have failed across the board. And you can revenge yourself all you want, but it won’t do anything to make you live longer. No, your best bet is simply to CURE AIDS. You have the time, you have the resources, and now you have the desire. Of course, you will lose ALL of that if you disclose to the public that you are one of the infected. I’m afraid that they will think the worst of you, thanks to your massive propaganda campaign that has convinced America that only the unclean and immoral get something like AIDS. Your constituency will not be sympathetic, I’m afraid. You could always do a push poll – but I think you are cannier than that.”

“You can live for a long time with HIV and not cross over,” said Jones. “But you will see how much fun that is. No one is gonna fuck you; not even people you pay.”

“I won’t have to tell them,” mumbled the Senator.

“It’s funny how rumors get started in the underworld,” said Jack. “It’s like they appear out of nowhere, and suddenly everybody’s talking. High class hookers may not know astronomy, but they sure know which big shots are low on leukocytes.”

“What about my wife? The children we are going to have? My future?” mumbled Senator Kelly from the bottom of the tub.

“I believe in you, Senator Kelly,” said Jack. “I believe in the democratic process. We put a man on the moon! We have mapped the human genome! I think we can handle this one. I think an AIDS cure is right there on the tip of the human technological tongue! Now get to it! A lot of people are depending on you. Guess what? No matter what happens now, you are going to die a hero as long as you keep fighting.”

The two housebreakers saluted.

“We won’t have that luxury,” said twitchy. “We are God’s little monsters. But we take full responsibility, which is something. So hate us; save yourself; save the planet.”

“Goodnight, Senator Kelly,” said Jack.

But Senator Kelly had already begun to snore. In the morning, he would think it had all been a dream. Some fucked up omen from deep inside his guilty unconscious. He would pledge to really DO something about the worldwide AIDS epidemic. Maybe give a speech to a lodge of community leaders. Go see a movie about San Francisco fags learning to find a place in a hostile community.

And then he would get himself tested.

And maybe the test would be negative. Maybe Jack was just fucking with people in power to get a rush.

But honestly – how effective would that be?