Fear and Loathing in Tempe

The TV news was playing on  a flat screen television that had been mounted on the wall.  It was telling me about a military guy who went ape shit.  The news described how the man killed a dozen or two of his fellow soldiers in great detail.

The television  confirmed a lot of things my roommate was reading over at the Scientology Reading Room.  I had been going to the Reading Room with my roommate every few days for over a month.

The news program was on a loop or something, because I had seen the report play before.  I think the thing that the Scientologists liked best about the report was that the killer was a military psychiatrist. Whenever the newsman said "psychiatrist" in the report the volume of the television skyrocketed.

We were hanging out in the reading room because we were supposed to get a free personality test, but the fuckers adjusting the volume on the TV had been putting us off for more than a month. 

I think it might have been my roommate's appearance that was scaring the behavioral professionals at Scientology Reading Room.  After my roommate took off his hat and exposed his huge afro they said something like, "Personality wasn't our problem."

I asked my roommate, "When are you going to get a hair cut?"

My roommate had tried cutting it himself a week ago.   His hair was sheared off in lumps.  He had borrowed my beard trimmer and had done a lousy job of it.  His afro looked like a Halloween pumpkin carving that had been done by a mongrel child.  And I told him so.

"Why do you think I am wearing the hat?"  He asked.

"I don't think you are fooling anyone."  I told him.  My roommate was dressed in gym shorts that were too tight fitting.  Whenever he walked his balls were exposed a bit.  You could make out the nappy patch of black fuzz that protected his genitalia if you squinted long enough.

My roommate hated wearing shirts.  Whenever we were in public I demanded that he put one one on.  He only relented when I told him we were going out later to someplace "to get drunk."

"I don't think a fedora goes with gym shorts."  I told him.

"It's the only clean thing I own."  He replied back.

"Great."  I feigned enthusiasm for him.

My roommate wanted to know when I would be done downloading the latest Woody Allen movie.

"I have no idea."  I told him.  "I do not control the internets."

Earlier that day I had been  listening to a Hunter S. Thompson audio book on my Phillips mp3 player.  Hunter S. Thompson had gotten in my head, and I decided I needed a night out.

A night out that involved something other than one of the ordinary things I did like downloading Woody Allen movies.  A night that promised drinking and sex, or at least drinking and rubbing up against strange woman when they tried to walk past you to get to the restroom.

"Thank god women have small bladders."  I said aloud.

The woman next to me was reading a copy of Dianetics.  She looked up from the book and gave a me a quizzical expression.

"I don't think she really wants me to answer that."  I thought to myself.

"What are you talking about?" My roommate asked me.

"Nothing important."  I told him.  "I was just thinking about later tonight is all."

"Oh."  My roommate said.  He was nodding his head in agreement with me like he knew what I was talking about.  He was reading a magazine about Army medical doctors and how they are training young people to kill.

"This shit is impressive."  He said.  More to himself than to me or the woman seated next to me.  The woman kept looking up at him every time he nodded and said "impressive."

My roommate would not sit down for very long.  He liked to pace around the room while holding the newspaper, or magazine he was reading.  He had a certain gait to him.  He walked with a languid sumptuousness that on occasion was interrupted by what looked liked skipping.   When he tilted his head to read his feather tipped fedora hat would slip down to the side of his head exposing his badly cut afro again.

The woman who sat next to me asked me questions with her eyes.  I was glad she included me in the "what the fucks up with that guy?" that was obviously running through her head.

I was also glad she sat on my left hand side.  That way she could not see the sebaceous cyst that was growing back on the right side of my skull.  Soon I would need a feather tipped fedora too.

I just gave the lady a shrug.  "What can you do?"  Is what the shrug implied.  I leaned back into the padded chair and let my back straighten out.

I smiled and thought to myself. "She can't see the gangrene with my shoes on." 

This is the first excerpt from Fear and Loathing in Tempe.  My forthcoming novel.