A flawlessly sunny summer day. An audience of hundreds of thousands has congregated in front of the Washington Monument, all facing the same direction. They are listening to a lone speaker at a podium positioned in front of the reflection pool. The voice of the speaker is broadcast through vintage speakers in wooden boxes mounted on poles throughout the area. I was at the very back trying to get a look at the man at the podium through the tightly packed group and unable to hear the man on the microphone clearly.

I lift off of the ground and begin flying over the masses toward the monument and the speaker. I look down at the people below me. They are entranced by the speakers words; hanging on every turn of phrase and point of emphasis. I still couldn't quite make out what the speaker was saying, but it was definitely resonating in a powerful way with the people around me. I whizzed over the heads of hundreds of thousands of loyal listeners until I came within eye and earshot of the focus of the gathering.

There was a man at the podium. He was wearing a double-breasted blue suit, white shirt and a blood red tie, Windsor knotted and dimpled perfectly. He had the weathered, battle tested horns of a ram growing out of his head, and short, impeccably managed silver hair growing around them. His eyes didn't have pupils. Instead they housed a swirling grey mass that looked like a miniature hurricane in each socket. As I looked at his eyes, I noticed that tears were running down both sides of his face. When he spoke, he wasn't actually saying words in English, it was more like a series of furious, guttural grunts and growls that were being unnaturally hammered into a microphone and assaulting the ears of the audience. I couldn't understand how the audience knew what the speaker was saying, but they did. Some of them swayed back and forth as if in a trance, all while the speaker twisted and ungulated at the podium, his tears beginning to splash on the podium and stain the breasts of his suit jacket.

The speaker raised his arms out in a pose mimicking the crucifixion, the audience roared in approval and I noticed his arm was adorned with a red band. It looked like a Nazi arm band at first as it had a white circle with a black logo in the middle of it, but as I looked closer I found that it wasn't a swastika. It was a black hand sickle.

**

I woke up on the floor of my bedroom at 6:00 a.m. on a Friday morning, one day before Christmas Eve. Nine months had passed since the fight in front of Rob's grandmother's house, and I was finding myself on the floor of my bedroom in the mornings frequently. Most of the time it was because that's where I passed out drunk, but on the nights that I didn't come home plastered, I was having such intense, reoccurring dreams that I was literally tossing myself out of bed and onto the carpet without even waking up. I would have the dream with the horned man almost weekly. I didn't understand what they meant and it scared me because I know that having them instead of my typical sex dreams involving random girls from my high school graduating class wasn't normal.

I found I was withdrawing from social interaction and away from my friends. Occasionally I would notice and make overcompensating efforts to reconnect with people I cared about; a string of voicemails here, a lengthy email detailing how distraught that "we weren't hanging out anymore" there. We were at an age where friends drift apart to separately succeed in life, but I couldn't see past the fact that I was drowning in depression and only knew how to stay afloat with distraction. Mental health professionals were entirely useless to me. I had gone to a few child therapists when I was little when my mom thought I wasn't adjusting to the divorce well, and all that resulted in were a handful of scary crayon drawings of my family and me telling grown men and women that they didn't know what they were doing. My friends were always the ones to help me through things. I couldn't have been more desperate for companionship and distraction, so I begged for it and all I succeeded in doing was creeping my friends out and pushing myself even further from my lifeline. Like a million other emotionally repressed New Englanders before me, I chose getting fucked up as my silver medal psychologist.

Heavy drinking almost guaranteed I wouldn't dream when I slept and it was keeping The Voices at bay, so I drank a lot. It was a gradual transition into alcohol dependency. I drank every night and sometimes I would tip a little whisky into my coffee in the morning. I didn't really see a problem with self-medicating. I was a functional drunk, meaning I could function at work and in my personal life while fairly intoxicated. I realized I had this ability when I was experimenting with alcohol at the age of 15, when I would always be the last kid standing with a bottle of Mad Dog at underage parties. My friends and family never noticed when I was drunk, and if I ever felt like I was slipping past the point of being able to mask being buzzed or hung over on the job, I would pop an Adderal and sit on the toilet seat until it kicked in. I would come back in to the office afterward and toil over spreadsheet macros with a moist brow and shaky hands as stimulants and depressants waged war underneath my business casual attire.

Like any other morning after one of the dreams, I tried not to think about it while I began my morning routine; cleaning myself up for another day at the energy trading desk. I still worked there despite Don's previous efforts to rifle me out. The work was still insanely fast paced and unorganized, but things on the desk had actually simmered down over the months. I used work to drown out my emotions and that came with its own macabre set of rewards. Unlike my personal life, work was better than ever. Don calmly asked me to do things and I would do them in a timely manner. The mood in the office was as relaxed and as pleasant as energy trading can possibly be. I popped some prescription Prilosec, got dressed and followed frozen brick sidewalks to work.

As soon as I set my briefcase down, Jay popped up out of his chair and surprised me with a tall paper cup of cappuccino.

"Mikey baby! Happy Christmas or whatever the fuck you goyems call a holiday!" Jay loved being Jewish on Christmas more than anything in the world. "Guess who's coming for good little boys and girls?"

"Wait, what?" I was pre-caffeine and nowhere near ready to absorb that much enthusiasm.

"Peter Claus is cominggggg - to towwwwwnnnnn!" Jay outstretched his arms in a jazz hands pose as he did this. Peter, our district manager, was due to arrive at our branch to give performance reviews and the annual raises that follow. In all the craziness at work, I completely forgot that he was due for a visit. I busted my ass over the year and knew the performance review was going to be a breeze. I was counting on the extra money to put toward a new car to replace the shit brown '87 VW Jetta I was using to putt around town. I was a professional and I couldn't be taken seriously driving a jalopy that could have belonged to Gutter from PCU. I kept an Audi A4 as my desktop wallpaper and longingly stared at it while I foraged through mountains of time-stamped carbon paper trade tickets and frantic client inquiries all day.

Snow started pummeling the seacoast around 5:00 pm and everybody but me slipped their commuter boots on and went home early before the roads got too bad. I typically stayed behind after closing time to go over the day's trade executions and made sure none of our brokers screwed up. I liked the office when it was empty and didn't mind staying longer at night to play a little music and quietly close up shop.

Peter walked through the doorway to the trading desk, patted me on the back and sat down in Don's chair to wait while I finished tying up the loose ends of the day. Peter was larger than life - a 6' 4", 300 lb. man that towered over every employee he stood next to like a Cool Water saturated redwood. He was in his early 40's, with salt and pepper hair and a wrinkled Brooks Brothers oxford that screamed 50% travel requirements. Peter seemed like an anomaly in the financial world because he was such a nice guy. I hadn't been in the industry for very long, but I was in long enough to know I always felt like I was the only person in the room that wasn't a creative black hole pretending to have a type A personality. Peter was a good guy and somehow managed to do really well among the jackals. I liked him a lot.

"Another week gone in the wild world of energy! How are you, Mikey?" Peter clapped his hands in applause. I hated it when Jay called me Mikey because it seemed condescending out of him, but with Peter it was a term of endearment and much less abrasive than the "MICHAEL" or "IDIOT" I was regularly summoned with.

"Yes sir! It was a crazy week but we definitely did a lot of business. Good stuff right before the holidays."

Peter stood up. "Absolutely. Hey, can I snag you away from this and see you in the conference room for a bit?"

"Yeah, of course." I could smell my bonus drifting towards me on heavy cologne fumes.

Peter and I walked into the foyer and took a left at the conference room. He sat at the head of the table, pulled a manila file folder with my name printed on the tab out of his briefcase and set it on the table in front of him. I sat in the chair directly to the left of Peter and leaned back, expecting a glowing review.

"Well, you've been kicking ass the last few months, Mikey. That's for sure."

"Thank you, Peter. That means a lot. I've really been pouring myself into my role here."

"Definitely. How are things between you and Don?" Peter furrowed his brow and leaned back a little further in his chair, showing mild concern.

"Well, things were a little tense for a while after the whole bereavement thing -"

"Christ," Peter interrupted me "I'm still so sorry about that, Mikey. He had no right to do that. You know that, right? I gave him a tongue lashing for pulling that shit."

I feigned like I was just learning about Don's reprimand for the first time. "Wow, Peter. I can't thank you enough for going to bat for me. That was really cool of you. I mean it."

"Yeah...so things are OK on the desk, then?"

"Yeah" I could sense anxiety building in Peter's voice, something I wasn't used to. "Why, is Don saying something else?"

Peter took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "He says things aren't working out, Mikey."

"What? What do you mean? We haven't butted heads in months, Peter. Anyone will tell you. What did he say I did wrong?"

"It's nothing you did, Mike. You're a good worker. He says there's just a personality conflict between you two and things just aren't working out. Honestly, I don't think they're working out either."

I stared at Peter for a minute before I realized what was going on. He was firing me. Don waited until there was enough time separating him from the bereavement incident in April and fired me via Peter so he wouldn't have to do it himself. Tension in my neck knotted up like I was being strangled. My breathing became shallow and I could feel my eyes welling up. Oh Jesus. Oh fuck. Oh Jesus.

"Are...are you...are you letting me go, Peter?" I choked up as the reality of my career being curb-stomped into a coma played out in front of me. I swallowed and swallowed, but the lump in my throat wouldn't go down.

"I'm sorry, Mikey. I know how much this place means to you. Look, I'm not going to kick out into the cold. I'm going to set you up with a decent severance package. You'll be alright."

"I'm...getting fired...on...Christmas..."

"I'm going to set you up with a career counselor as well. Would you like that?"

I looked at Peter, and he looked as distraught giving me the bad news as I did taking it in. I tried not to blink as I looked him in the eye because I knew my eyes were welling up and that would send two tears rolling down my cheeks. The energy desk in Portsmouth was an anomaly; New York or Chicago were where you needed to be if you were going to have anything to do with energy trading as a newcomer to the industry. I thought about a number of jobs I could have taken with our clearing house in Chicago or as a floor broker on the NYMEX. I knew that I wasn't in a position to move, and knowing that made the realization that I was truly out of the business hit home even harder. All at once, the deck of cards that built my professional and financial future were wheeled in front of an industrial fan and blown into purgatory. I looked at Peter and blinked.

"What am I supposed to do now?"

"I don't know, Mikey. I don't know."

I walked back into the office alone. I half expected Peter to stand watch as I threw my belongings into an empty printer paper box, but he stayed in the conference room and saved me the embarrassment. Once I was done piling years my life and a considerable amount of office supplies into it, I threw my coat on and walked out into the snow storm towards my Jetta. After quickly scraping the windows, I hopped in and put the key in the ignition, wanting nothing more than to drive to the bar and drown myself in pint after pint of Newcastle; to confront a urinal and piss my misfortune away every twenty minutes.

...cucucucucucuCuCuCuCUCUCUCUCUCUCU - CLUNK

It was the unmistakable sound of a four cylinder motor seizing. I almost expected to see some kind of suicide note on the oil cap reading "I just couldn't bear to have an unemployed dirt bag for an owner. I'm sorry." I sat in the passenger seat for a few minutes after that, watching the snow accumulate on the windshield.

Michael is a monster. Michael is going to make them all feel his pain.

The Voices were relentless. I punched my steering wheel a couple times because I didn't know what else to do. I stayed in that unlit parking lot for half an hour, screaming and crying and punching the steering wheel until my knuckles bled, all while The Voices tore me apart and snow covered my windows until I couldn't see out of them anymore. A piece of me died in that car.

Wet slush sheeted off my pea coat when I threw it on my kitchen table. I opened the freezer, pulled out a bottle of whiskey and took a long pull. I purposefully went without eating dinner so I could get drunk as quickly as possible. I needed to be numb. I drank and drank and cried and paced back and forth through my apartment. The more I drank, the more I thought about how much I hated myself. I pictured the ghost of my dad sitting in the room with me, silently watching and shaking his head in disapproval. I thought about how right he would have been to do so. I was a scumbag. I was a fucking scumbag whose sanity was being reduced to glowing embers because I couldn't forgive myself for letting my father die before I could make amends with him. I threw the bottle of whiskey at the wall and shattered it everywhere. I wanted family and friends to comfort me. I wanted God to grant me the strength to push the darkness away. I wanted to just exist for five seconds without wishing I was dead, but The Voices wouldn't allow it.

For Michael, Hell isn't the absence of God; it is living with the understanding that God hates him.

I punched my living room wall, sending my hand between two studs. I punched the hole again and again until my hand was covered in a red paste from fresh blood and dry wall dust intermingling.

Michael needs to be broken first before he will listen. He's crumbling now, watch.

I threw my kitchen table, kicked my bedroom door off of the hinges and threw a sink full of dirty dishes on the ground, shattering most of them.

Michael is fighting it, but not for much longer. He's coming around.

I trashed my apartment until my arms were tired and beads of sweat rolled off of my forehead. When there was nothing left to break, I sat down on my couch, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My surroundings disappeared in a whitewash, leaving just me and my shadow in an unyielding, unending sea of perfect white. I exhaled and opened my eyes.

It was at that very moment I stopped fighting The Voices -- my self-depreciating inner monologue turned personality disorder -- and accepted that I was insane.

I let them speak to me and I took it all in. I let them rip my soul to its foundation and begin to put me back together in Their image - the image of the horned man. I would use Him like Hindis use their deities and worship each facet of His being in daily affirmation. The Voices whispered things about my true nature to me and I understood them. I was inherently evil. They taught me that pain wasn't a curse, but a fuel that one could burn to reach impossible goals. They made me see that people were expendable and how to manipulate them as I saw fit. They taught me about fear and the value of having others fear you. I let The Voices dictate my new future to me as the sea of white dissipated and left me in the then present. I put my wet coat back on and walked out of my apartment to purchase what would become a vehicle of fear and a symbol of my transformation.

I came back twenty minutes later with a plastic shopping bag. I thought about how the new energy coursing through my veins as I threw a crumpled up receipt on my computer desk. I started whistling a Rolling Stones song and began putting my apartment back together.

THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT ACE HARDWARE!

1 BOX NITRILE GLOVES $9.99
2 GARDENING SICKLE $10.98
1 ROLL ELEC TAPE $0.99
SUB-TOTAL: $22.96
SALES TAX: $0.00
TOTAL: $22.96

ACE IS THE PLACE! 12/23/2003

"So don't you plaaaaaaay wiiith me, 'cause you're playin' with fiirreeeeee..."

I was in bed with my girlfriend when we were woken up by a loud thumping noise and muffled screaming. It was 3 a.m. on Monday morning. At first it sounded like there was some kind of domestic dispute in the apartment upstairs, but after the grogginess of Sunday night football beers and a few hours of sleep wore off, we realized there was somebody outside trying to gain entrance to our apartment building. Every 20 seconds or so, the thumping and screaming would start and stop in a new location; on the front porch, on a window, on the vinyl siding on the side of the building, almost like James Bond rapping on a bookcase to find the secret passage behind it, but with less style.

BANGBANGBANGBANG. "RAAAWWRRKAAALLLLLLRRGHHHHHH!!!"

BANGBANGBANGBANG."RAAAGHHHHHHHRRRLAAAAARRR!!!"

Continue reading "The Prowler"

Ladies and gentleman; there isn't going to be a part 5 of Ginsanity on kungfumike.net.

The more I work on this series, the more I'm coming to understand it isn't going to be complete as a multi-entry blog post. In order to give it the detail and attention it demands, I've come to the conclusion that Ginsanity is going to be my first book.

Tucker has been telling me to do this for years now. "Mike, you're hilarious and everything, but you and I both know your magnum opus is going to be the story about you and your father." I always knew he was right when he'd bring it up at the bar or in a random email exchange, but I pushed Tucker's advice to the side because I knew I wasn't emotionally ready to tackle it. I always thought that one day I'd be stable enough to open the vault that contains all of the hurt and the guilt and organize its contents for you in a calm and calculated way, like some kind of dark Rube Goldberg mechanism that spits my soul out at the end of its process. The more I live, the more I realize I'll probably never be that pillar of stability, but the more I work on this series, the more I understand that Ginsanity demands that I lock myself in that vault in order to write it the way it needs to be written. I now know there will never be a perfectly ideal time for this project to take the front burner...so why not now?

I'll still update my site to keep you guys entertained in the meanwhile, but as of right now, the book is where I am going to focus the bulk of my energy. Well, I'll at least split it evenly between the book, the therapist and the bottle.

And boobs. Don't forget boobs.

I've been getting a lot of response to the Ginsanity series since I've started publishing it here on kungfumike.net. The bulk of the people writing in have been saying how mystified they are about someone so goofy and funny being so tortured inside. I guess the best way I can explain that is with the theory that the best comedy always comes from a very dark place. George Carlin, Chevy Chase, Mitch Hedberg -- The greatest comedians are usually the ones with the most sordid back stories. I can't compare myself to those guys on a talent vs. talent basis, but I can certainly stand in a line-up of people who have used humor as a defense mechanism their entire lives without being told I'm in the wrong place. You use it to protect yourself so much that you end up developing a skill without being proud of it or even noticing it.

I mentioned in a note before the third installment of Ginsanity about how the series is taking its toll on me as I write it. I also mentioned that also touched on how I have to "let the crazy back in" to give the piece an honest voice. What I'm now discovering is that my stability on this side of the laptop is deteriorating almost at the same pace as the Mike on the other side in the story. The worse Mike five years ago gets, the worse I get. I sleep three to four hours a night, sparsely eat and aftershocks of co-dependency issues from the same time period are resurfacing, choking the essence out of relationships I have in real life. I suppose that last part doesn't really matter; nobody is going to want to have anything to do with this lunatic motherfucker by the end of the series anyway. I've had to write the bulk of this from a local coffee shop, just to keep me in check. Even then I find myself blotting my eyes with their brown, recycled paper napkins when I get overwhelmed.

After the last bout of teary, chest knotting breakdowns at my apartment this weekend, I've decided to give therapy a shot. I need to make the rational decision to do this now while there is a semblance of self control and self preservation left in me. At least I still have the foresight to know someone's going to need to be perpetually talking me off the ledge as I complete this series, and I can't expect family and friends to be that sounding board. It would make me feel even worse to put that kind of a burden on them.

If you guys want, I'll post entries like this from time to time so you know I'm not taking sabbatical at Arkham or floating face down in a pool somewhere with an "I'm sorry" post-it pinned to my shirt sleeve. I'm working on part five of Ginsanity as we speak, and I'll post it for you as soon as I can.

The dark street in front of Rob's grandmother's house was desolate, save for me menacingly marching towards Jimmy and Jimmy attempting to be menacing while stumbling towards me. We were fifteen feet apart. The fact that he swung at Timmy was just an excuse. I knew I wasn't saving the day, and I knew I wasn't about to fuck some random kid up to temporarily make myself feel better about my life - emotionally, I wanted to get out of the red and into the black. I saw what I was doing as putting good feeling in an ING account for a rainy day. I had already butchered Jimmy in my heart. All I needed to make that initial deposit was to make that vision a reality on the warm summer pavement in front of us.

Continue reading "Ginsanity; Part 4"

I know what you're thinking...what do KungFu Mike and a grilled cheese sandwich have in common?

The answer :

Bread = 2 Full size Toyota Tundras

Cheese = KungFu Mike

Tonight at work, I was pinned at the knees between two pick up trucks, one stationary and one going about 7 miles an hour as the result of a poorly planned joke on yours truly. The outcome of all of this was a trip to the emergency room to watch some Hannah Montana and pick up a massive leg brace that looks like a fucking yoga mat, armpit choking crutches, Percocets the size of frisbees and a date with an orthopedist tomorrow to see just how bad my shit is fucked. Hopefully they won't have to amputate my gam, but if they do, I'll do my best to see if they can retrofit my stump with a pogo stick or a gas powered, pull start dildo.

I'll be busy cranking out part 4 or Ginsanity while I'm immobile. I just wanted to let you guys know why you're going to start seeing weird posts from me for the next however many days. It's probably the percocet.

~KungFu Mike

Before I get into the third installment of Ginsanity, I wanted to apologize for how slow it's been coming out. In order for me to give this story the authenticity it demands, I have to almost relive every event; letting all the crazy back in and take over so I can paint the clearest possible picture for you. Doing that makes me hurt more than I think I can ever be 100% honest about. As I write all of this now, I find myself walking away from my computer in tears every ten minutes or so. I pace around my apartment and hold back the tears like I'm trying to hold in the last heave during a bout of puking. I cry and I get angry and I cry and I do that over and over. I somehow find a way to distract myself from those emotions and I sit back down to type more. If someone else was watching me try to pump this out, they would have me institutionalized in a heartbeat. I look completely wacked out of my head. Going through this process makes me realize just how truly broken of a human being I really am and it makes me wonder if I'll ever be able to completely separate myself from the monster I know I'm capable of being; the very monster you're watching slowly develop in this serialized piece.

Regardless of that, I apologize for the sporadic posts. Here's part III.

***

Continue reading "Ginsanity; Part 3"