ying on these sleeping bags, I let the ephedra work through my system and think about how wonderful it will soon feel to wake up smiling in a new place.

As soon as the sun is a faint white line in the west, the buses begin to run. I can get a hostel room for the afternoon and sleep, then be back here with my ex-housemate and his sawed-off shotgun. Ken used to be a bouncer at the 1201. I told him enough.

On my small battery-powered boombox, Eddie Murphy is going off about white people not moving out when things start to get weird in movies like "Poltergeist" or "The Amityville Horror." I know this bit word for word.

People are so trusting. I am living proof of that. What you don't see in the fine print can literally kill you.

I'd seen the flyer while wandering the campus of Reed College, broke and hungry, hanging up my own flyers at every possible rounder:

GRAPHIC DESIGN
BANDS WELCOME
WILL BEAT LOWEST RATES IN PORTLAND

The pentacles and moons hand-drawn on another flyer had caught my eye, good fine-line work that looked almost like a scratchboard. The body text had been written in bold print with a Sharpie:

WANTED: ARTISTS, WRITERS, MUSICIANS
Shared 6-bedroom house in Eastmoreland.
Large rooms $250-$400/mo. + 1/mo. deposit.
Spacement, large kitchen.
No support groups/shrinks.

The perfect setup for a house. Or so I thought at the time.

My friends from the art department congratulated me for finally finding a place. I'd come to school on work-study with no savings.

I called in the flyer and got a quick tour of everything I thought I needed, and what has turned out to be enough freak-scene in the side-scenes to fill up your average David Lynch movie in the first week alone.

All I had wanted was a clean well-lit place and a little time to think.

I sit here now with a million candles burning, writing in a notebook. Snippets of memory keep pulling me out of my little island of light with the fire guttering in the fireplace and my boombox blaring any stand-up comedy I can find. I have been through Bill Hicks' "Rant in E-Minor" twice now. That one's good to keep coming back to. What did I do with that one Steve Martin tape ...

Outside my room, the house is an icebox. Savagely brain-melting trance beats shake the walls. Eb's room must be on a separate circuit. I can feel the heat coming up through the floor with the bass.

It's getting on toward 10. Our nearest neighbor just moved out under rather mysterious circumstances a few days after calling the cops for what was our last-straw noise violation before getting evicted. Eb had gone round and round with Bill the neighbor about bass through the walls. It nearly came to blows the last time, and would have without the cops.

I have often wondered just exactly who the fuck our proxy house warlord thinks he is. I grew up five blocks from MacArthur Park in Oakland, about pissing distance from the PJ's. Eb might have lasted five minutes there with his attitude. Maybe. On a holiday.

All the neighbors on Bybee Boulevard, as far as 10 blocks back, have been up in arms anyway about the mounds of earth behind the house that reek suspiciously of cow shit. The Eastmoreland Neighborhood Committee muck-mucks had just had their own battle with Union Pacific the year before about contaminated dirt from the rail yards. So they weren't too big on us, after the owner ... or whoever ... had landscapers truck in several tons of fertilized topsoil to re-sod and re-seed the little old terraced back yard.

Eb claimed to know nothing about it. "Don't ask me, I just live here." While the weather was still slightly warm, the stink was god-awful.

The topsoil they brought in that day was strange, soft and yielding as shit itself, yet drying in places to a weird glaze. It reminded me of the St. Anthony graveyard in Oakland at the end of my block. No Cali-sized roaches, but ... there were mad bugs. Great, I thought. Come spring, he'll have a lot more housemates.

The owner is someone on Eb's dad's side. When I called the police back the morning after the last little shouting match, thinking to dig up some dirt on Eb to use later, the cops told me that the tax records showed the house in ownership by a private trust of the Vanian family. In perpetuity.

That slimy little fuck, I'd thought, after he had laid me out for cooperating with the police. His family owns the house, and they let him sublet it and keep the swag. I was so jealous I literally could not speak. What a racket!

Eb was a touchy one, I found out soon enough. The most otherworldly shit pissed him off, things that any human sublettor wouldn't have batted an eyelash at. The wallpaper in the bathroom next door to my room had been peeling in strips, and it seemed like everyone in and out of that place took turns getting rid of one of the ugly hanging flaps that looked so much like dead skin.

I have the corner penthouse next to the bathroom, and a bad-ass easel I scrounged up from the basement that sees more of me than any of the housemates. One day, I had been wired out of my skull, taken a bath, dried off ... and in a fit of industry, torn down every sheet. The walls were waterproof pressboard beneath, I saw, and fairly cheap to re-paper. The place had been billed as a "collective." I thought I was, in some small off-handed way, speeding up the renovations.

Eb had knocked on my door an hour later. "I was going to do some tribal art in between the torn-off parts, layer them together. Total heroin chic." He sounded defeated. I shrugged from my easel.

"Sorry, man. If I'd known–"

"Well, it can't be helped." Eb said shortly, and slammed the door.

There were all sorts of other little nitpicky things like that. When you get two creative people who are almost exactly alike in the same living space, the fur inevitably flies.

Come to think of it, Eb and I do look a bit alike, though I am clean-shaven, half a head taller and all pierced up. My hair is nearly the same shade as his.

But more than any of that, it's something about our aspects. We move the same, react the same sometimes, somehow. We read a lot of the same things. In the early days, I would often stop and listen below, hearing the same song that had been going through my head as I worked in silence playing on from his big bumpin' system.

At the time, I saw all these as good things. Like the way Eb would always finish people's sentences with that bright bad-seed kid twinkle in his eyes. Or the way he would come in creeping and leave a poster or a CD out for you to borrow when you weren't around.

But now I am starting to wonder. A lot.

I'm getting out. I have the deposit rolled up in my pocket, and all my gear stowed into four boxes, three suitcases, the boombox, and the computer with two years' worth of art-history papers and Photoshop files on it.

Ken had heard the Readers' Digest Condensed version of my situation and simply shrugged, his big booming voice on the phone like an audio Get Out of Jail Free card.

"Yeah, man." His cell reception was breaking up a bit. "The basement's still all hooked up. Sorry to hear about all this. Like I said before, $150 a month, and help out with the juice and the DSL and stuff, so probably about $230."

"Have I told you lately that I love you?" I deadpanned. Ken roared with laughter.

"See you tomorrow, man. Don't work too hard."

"That'll be the least of my problems."

I clamp down on the memory, hoping that it's not too late ... suddenly grabbing a candle from beside me. The kitchen phone is ringing. Something is burning on the gas stove. Smells like my soul. The breaker has cut out again.

All right, call me a pussy. Tonight, as amped-out and sleep-deprived as I am, I am scared shitless of whatever you want to call it about this house. I would rather chew off my own arm than go down to the basement even for the three seconds it would take me to flip the switch.

I can write in the dark if I take my time. Something about this wants telling. So I grab my notebook in my free hand.

The darkness is so alien of angle that I must move by feel. The shotgun blasts of phosphorescent stars I had lambasted my walls with do well enough until I get to the door of my room. Then I'm screwed.

Old man Vanian had built the place in '41, I'd heard. The walls in daylight are hideous off-white with rotten-meat-colored trim, made of plaster that cracks into earthquake faults every time you drive a thumbtack home. There are a million little side rooms and crawlspaces, and a secret room behind a panel in the wall behind the bar of the "spacement." (I can't get it out of my head how crawlingly yuppified such a word sounds in my mouth, but George Carlin was already through the whole yuppie trip on tape an hour or so ago.)

Waking up in the darkness there all those nights, I always felt as though I was eight again, sleeping over at my gramma's in Berkeley. The neighborhood looked a lot like Oregon, now that I think about it. They hadn't renovated since World War II there, either.

In this house, at first, I would sit there with the space heater going, curled up under about a million unzipped sleeping bags and puffy comforters. After a while, I would pull them up over my head and blank my mind.

Still the dreams in that house grew worse and worse, until I was missing class, finally springing for a bottle of ephedra at Plaid Pantry. My sketchbooks began to fill. The prodigious output that my advisor crowed over was precious little comfort.

I learned a lot from all the old newspaper clippings that Feral, the original upstairs tenant (some 17-year-old computer whiz kid from the Shitheads For Peace movement) had dug out of the attic crawlspace. That day, Feral had been pissing and moaning about the dust and we'll have to get respirators to clean this part out. I had been standing there waiting for him to pack the bowl, not exactly sure who the "we" was in the scenario. But Feral is too young to realize how annoying he can sometimes be.

A few bowls later, Feral had come bursting into my room, his black hair everywhere and his weird girl's eyes glowing. Even more than a Campbell's Soup Kid, at the moment he looked like Sonic the Hedgehog about to go straight Columbine on someone. He was barefoot in baggy blue cords, and his black T-shirt looked like it had done some time at the tree-sit it advertised.

"Eb says he's kicking me out," he quavered, but the note beneath was strident and smug. "He wouldn't give me a reason."

My gesso-covered hands shaking with the frustration of a broken groove, I set the canvas and pallet knife down on my easel that dominated the back wall, turning wearily. "That's three down," I said, frowning. "Only ones left are Josh and me. And Will, but Will just rents the workspace–"

Feral nodded. "I know. He hasn't said anything to you yet?"

I shook my head, sighing. "Great, is he–

The kid cut me off. "No, but he keeps talking about having to go back to Arizona pretty soon. Like in a week. Some big spiritual thing, I don't know. Going to the desert. He says he's got friends waiting for him. I guess ... I guess it's something he musta set up a while back." Feral shivered. "He talks in riddles."

I shrugged. "It ain't me, it ain't mine." Something occurred to me. "But if I do get the boot, I want my deposit back."

I got my deposit back last night. The bills are all 1930s-vintage but carefully washed and pressed into an envelope with a wax seal on the back, the kind of seal you can get for a buck a throw at the art stores downtown.

It shows a leaning, ruined steeple, superimposed beneath some dickhead in a goat mask turned around backward. I tossed it in the fireplace. Probably got it out of a gumball machine at the Roxy or something. It looked like the pictures in all these books he had, some Mason cult or another called the Fraternia Saturnis or however you said it. Whatever. I was not impressed.

The night of Feral's announcement, he had heard me speak of the deposit and leaned in closer.

"I have nightmares about him, man. He just sort of shows up out of nowhere, and gets all shocked when I recognize that he's there whisperin' all this shit that doesn't make any sense, with the lights off."

My own shock must have shown on my face, but I pushed it aside. "I don't think he digs you like that, big papa." I somehow managed a grin. "Eb goes through girls the way I go through cigarettes."

"That's just it." Feral looked confused. "He hasn't, lately. Not since the last time Zorya was here. She hasn't called or anything. But ... wait." Feral finally realized what I meant.

"No, no, I don't think that either." He took everything so literally. "But ... he told me once that he wanted to start a school for children and just ... bend them to his will."

Feral's sea-blue eyes seemed to shine with their own light of fear. "And he was totally straight up. I was like 'Oh, ha-ha, Eb made a funny–'" The smile was instantly gone. "And he's just like, 'No. What you got to say?'"

But Feral had moved out. Late one night when I lay in bed counting Valium, I heard him dragging his shit downstairs and around the back. Left big, long divots in the carpet. Like I gave a fuck. Feral never interrupted me again.

I move now through the darkened dining room like a little kid in a dream daring to run the gauntlet of monsters, the unbidden, frustrated scream locked in my throat.

The phone rings endlessly, endlessly. That goddamn phone has been the bane of my existence. I'm the only one who answers it, most of the time. I could put it on my taxes under employer: Starving Artist/Phone Bitch.

Eb has some weird doorbell amplifier thing hooked onto the phone. There are two phones, in fact, both split from the same jack. I had raised an eyebrow about that, but I couldn't have cared less who was listening in.

I have to venture out to get more wood for the fire, anyway. And it could be Ken.

The flickering flame plays tricks with the low back hallway, like there are people walking up and down staircases set into the mangy old beige shag carpet. Both bedroom doors are whispering back and forth.

It sounds like the phone is ringing faster than normal. Maybe long distance or something. Great. If it's long-distance for me this late, it's bound to be bad news.

The door to Juice's old room blows open. For a second along the molding flush with the floor I see a thin line of congealed blood, separating back into yellow plasma and blackish-brown mung, welling downward in jittery streaks. There's a contact lens stuck in it, and one of those metal-banded hair ties glimmers in the moonlight on the floor.

Juice had moved out a week ago, probably on one of those days when I lay in a numb cloud of Benadryl and bass that vibrated the walls, unable to sleep even with twice the recommended dosage in my system. Before I moved into this old house, one Benadryl would put me on my ass.

I'll come back, I tell myself, not attaching any real significance to it. Right now, my hallucinations have more functioning brain cells than I do. As always, I feel 20 years younger in that shifting darkness, my proximity sensors chilling every nerve ending and goose bump on my body, and my wavy mop of hair trying to stand up beneath the bandanna that I forgot to take off at what I thought was bedtime.

"Why didn't any of you–" I begin, turning back to the three shadows sitting before the dead fireplace in the living room. On the table, a dried bouquet of roses casts odd shadows from a cracked vase. My candle flame had made it look like there were three heads chillin' up in there, some old buzzard in a snap-brim hat, an old woman ... and something small and hunched over in a chair.

Something that did not like the light.

I peer in ... and there is a hiss. Nebulum, the big old tabby who came with the house, is fighting with Eb's skinny little gray familiar whose name no one can pronounce. The smaller cat is reared back and almost standing, clawing at the air with his forepaws.

Weird. Apparently, I had brought the flame too close to my amphetamine-dilated eyes as the shadows of the roses danced in a strange cucholaris effect from the backward motion of the candle. Wow. Pretty good. I'll sketch that into the margins of my notebook later, with the fire stoked up to Miltonian heights and Judy Tenuta singing love songs to the Pope.

Most of the doors between the living room, dining room, back hallway and kitchen are sliding doors. Eb keeps them shut for some reason.

In my scant weeks at "The Place Where Lost Things Dwell" (as Will the hippie drum-maker who rents out the garage refers to it) I have noticed no reflective surfaces anywhere. Not even mirrors in the bathrooms. And the breakers keep going out. Eb is chronically anti-heat, but that's okay by me with the space heater going. Catch is, mine takes about half an hour to warm up. So more often than not, it's a Jack London story trying to get to sleep.

So with all of this pondering and oscillating in my head, I make my shivering way through the sliding doors into the kitchen. My vision has been blurring quite badly. There it goes again.

Here we are in the kitchen. Feral is back, looking strangely gray. There's dirt and cowshit on his face and hands, like he was digging in the back yard. And he's wearing one of Eb's old flannel shirts, all hunched over. His shoulder had been bothering him, he'd said. Must not have improved any since he'd moved out or whatever.

And Eb is there, in his old green L.L. Bean coverall, with his wavy hair tied back in a ponytail and his dark eyes glittering. His Fu Manchu mustache, goatee and sideburns bristle on his face. Eb is doing something in front of Feral's flat, shining eyes with a glowing coal, muttering.

Then Eb looks straight at me, his voice the low, carrying sibilant hiss of a stage magician.

"I don't need an audience."

I twitch, making some horrified exclamation ... and it's just Josh, frowning over the coffee grinder and looking for all the world like a tall, exasperated younger version of the great actor William H. Macy. He wears a coverall, too, but his is black and has a grinning gorilla on the tag.

Oh, my mind is going. Such a relief to only have to stay here one more night.

Josh turns, running a hand through his graying hair. He must have just gotten off late-shift down at the docks.

"Hey!" he grins, picking up his scrolled glass pipe and black Bic lighter off the counter and handing them in my direction: "Wanna smoke some ... marra-hwana?!?"

I sigh with relief. "Any port in a storm, man. I am seein' some shit that George Lucas couldn't direct."

Josh frowns at me as I light the pipe. He clicks the lid down on the grinder and cusses. The juice is still off. The moon shines down through the skylight. Josh sighs with disgust.

There are parts of this house that are really cool, I think for the millionth time, looking out the window at the stars through an exhaled cloud of blue smoke. It just needs some love.

I pause to jot that down.

"Can't ..." Josh hesitates. "Can't you sleep either?"

I shake my head and hand him the pipe. At his feet, his lab crossbreed, Jazz, is looking up at him expectantly, turning to glance around and utter a low whine.

"You guys wanna go out?" he calls. From the doorway, his other dog, a little fluffy white ankle-biter Sheltie type critter named Sula, trots in and wags her tail eagerly, looking nervously at the basement the same way that Jazz is doing.

"Another night in the funhouse." I mumble sleepily.

Josh hands me the pipe, looking around. "Yeah I'm ... startin' to watch the classifieds." He looks at the back stairs. "Might check the breakers, too, while I'm out."

I nod, embarrassed. "How long has it been?"

Josh frowns. "Well, I just got in the door and all the lights were off–"

"No." I shake my head. "How long since you got a good night's sleep?"

"That's a good question." Josh thinks a moment. "Somethin' usually always wakes me up. Either the dogs'll be howling or ... I just have these kind of dreams where you have to ..."

Josh spins one hand, tired and starting to feel it, searching for the words.

"Swim up outta there no matter what?" I suggest, and he nods.

"It's like something in the water." That isn't exactly what it's like, but the weed has caught up with me already. "Like ... you ever notice how ... when you go without sleep for a really long time, you start to dream while you're awake?"

Josh snaps his big, callused fingers. "Perfect, man. That's it exactly. So you hallucinate. Like when you drive, seein' shit jumpin' out at you."

"Exactly." The last time that had happened to me, I had been unbelievably lucky to avoid getting in a wreck.

His eyes glitter, somewhere else in time. "Where I grew up, the Lakotas always said that that was part of the vision quest. Clean yourself out, stay up for a few days ... and trigger all the ass-backwards neurotransmitters that allow you to access that ... other reality."

I nod fiercely. "Yeah. Timothy Leary used to do things like that, too." Looking longingly at the coffee grinder, I will my mind to keep blank and stay in the moment. Every time it stops ... I start to drift, and see more than the eye of Man was meant to behold.

Gotta keep writing this down.

I wobble unsteadily on my feet as I pass him the pipe. "It's taken my work to new levels, though. Since I've been here, I got through a two-year backlog."

Josh gestures at the stairs to his attic room, around the other side of the kitchen door. He has an ancient hollow-bodied Fender, and is hip-deep in fusion jazz and old-school Delta blues. "I know what you mean, man. When I get up there and play, it's, like ... hauntingly good."

I smile. "You know, I will regret leaving here, even though a lot of it was like this nightmarish acid trip."

"Oh, yeah." Josh looks up, his index finger like a pointer on the air. "That was the other thing."

I wait.

Out of the basement, there comes a high, ululating warble that sounds as if no human throat could have produced it, followed by a laugh that lasts about a minute, and cackling cries of: "Oh my God! Oh my God!"

Gotta stay focused, and not think about what I see at the end of the hall. No. I won't say it. The door's there. This is all in my mind. Oh ... wait. Yeah. It's shut. Time for another hit.

"When you said–" Josh backtracks himself. "I ran into Eb before I left for work. He said he was 'reprogramming,' whatever the hell that is, and he bought those two ten-strips of acid last night."

There are noises of breakage from below, and what sounds like a stepped-on cat. Not that you could swing a dead cat in this house without stepping on a live one. Just lately, I've been thinking of putting up a sign over the door and charging the neighborhood cat owners by the hour. All of them have little, rattling laser-etched nametags on their collars, yuppie cats every one.

They love the basement, crowding around Eb's door in the back section that goes beneath the yard ... and when they hang out here for a while, they all go ...

... They all go feral, I think, feeling like a dream of dreaming. Somehow, that cold inner sense shakes me out of my daze. Josh motions at the pipe in my hand.

"You can finish that," he says, turning for the door and reaching for the black watch-cap in his back pocket. "I'll pack another when we get back."

And he steps out the back door, and down the stairs. That was five hours ago.

So now I sit here in my room again, with thousands more candles burning. I found a box of old Reader's Digest Condensed Books in the closet of my room, and a can of lighter fluid that I knew was under the kitchen sink, one squirt shy of full. The sun should be up soon.

The fire keeps going out every couple of minutes. I have started burning old press folders too, and a few shirts I was going to drop off at Goodwill.

The walls are bending again. Eb's laughter is louder now, shaking the building. Vibrating the floor. Making all the doors creak open by themselves.

Especially ...

... mine.

In the living room, the shadows come and go.

Easy. Easy does it. You're going to make it through this night and have those old bastards at the galleries on First Thursday quick-drawing their checkbooks and throwing them at you. You're gonna have Gus Van Sant VH-1 MTV Indo for weeks and a big old house built sometime this year straight to the top baby the world is your template just don't

close

your

O JESUS MARY JOSEPH THE CARPENTER

WHAT
THE FUCK
IS WRONG WITH MY

EYES

The knock at the door was louder than God just now. I jump three feet in the air. Just gotta outlast this just gotta keep writing no matter what he throws at you come on come on baby this is just a dream you fell asleep–

The burning white light shines at chest level as the door creaks open, pausing at the big furry towel across the bottom to keep the heat in ...

... and then the huge black steel-toed boot kicks it back the rest of the way. And the light bobs forward, through the candles. Toward the bed.

"Ebenezer Vanian." It is not a question. The big old crew-cut cop behind the blinding flashlight has cauliflower ears and a nose broken an unbelievable number of times. "We had a complaint about the noise, from the McCauslands up the road. That's your last. We have a warrant. We're just gonna have a look around." He holds up a very thick white sheaf of paper with yellow carbons beneath it. "And we ... oh, what happened?"

He grins wolfishly, coming around my side of the mattress on the floor. "What happened, sir? Are you injured?"

"No, Officer." But my voice sounds funny, like there is a bubble in my throat or something. I swallow hard when I see that his gun is drawn. "Why–"

And my breath stops. My green coverall is soaked with blood, and my gesture of negation is cancelled out by my sticky hands.

But I am not bleeding.

"Don't you see?" I lean forward. "There are so many rooms ... that go on so far. And the back yard–" I am grasping at straws. "My name is Larry Cresswell ..."

"I talked to you the last time, Vanian. I'm through talkin'," the cop says disgustedly, then arm-locks and handcuffs me before I have time to blink.

hey won't let me have paper here. They say that my family has no forwarding address, though I keep telling them Oakland, Calif., and my last name. They tell me that the last known address for my father was Flagstaff. But my father's name is Pete, and he's in a wheelchair in North Berkeley. His number's not even unlisted.

Any letters to non-family are right out. They are calling Eb the new Zodiac Killer. The reporters circle this hospital like sharks.

There was the inevitable circus when it hit the papers. They found Feral's jawbone in the back yard, and a dead dog cut up into filets, and a bunch of other stuff no one will tell me about.

"Oh, you KNOW," the cops had said that night. "We'll help ya remember." WHACK. The night
the lights went out in Portland. They were upset.

Eb's flyers are going to be Exhibit A. I hear they even got Vincent Bugliosi's son to be a legal consultant. Bugliosi was the guy that got Manson life in jail.

But the activists are out in force, and my lawyer has been calling shrinks. Governor Kitzhaber has taken a firm stand against the death penalty.

And somewhere in Arizona, possibly outside of Flagstaff ... there is a white male, 6'3", 160 pounds, blood type AB+, 25 years of age, wavy auburn hair, bad knees and piercings, and a snake tattoo around his right bicep at the shoulder. The snake's a bad job. A friend of mine let me use his homemade tattoo gun when we were kids.

Somewhere out there. He might possibly use a cane. He hasn't had to put up with the knees as long as I did.

Somewhere out there, with the fading sun going down to the barks of coyotes and the sage-scented wind through the arroyos. Possibly answering to the name of Larry Cresswell.

Or maybe he has a new name now.

I've got a big day tomorrow with the shrinks. I'm going to play ball with them, and go for the amnesia angle the way that my lawyer affirmed once he fed me an Ativan and talked me out of the freakout.

Given the somewhat extraordinary nature of this case and my lack of a previous criminal record (or so the lawyer said), there is all the room in the world for an insanity plea. So much less paperwork than the truth. Hell, there was a crooked cop in San Francisco who shot the mayor and one of the city supervisors and got off by saying he'd been up all night and not eating right.

I am going to be a model patient. Hell, I might even get to like the quiet. I'll use the felt-tip pens they give you so you don't dig your wrists open. They shade all right if you take your time. And unlike most things here at the Spastic Ranch, time is a commodity that runneth over.

In the long, long interim, if they don't let me have paper, I'll commit the story to verbal memory by repetition. For my work, if they deny me paper and pen, maybe I might make a quill out of one of those plastic sporks, take a page from the Marquis de Sade's notebook and employ the new, uh, "blood and Time magazine" medium that will make all those fucks at First Thursday stop and be
human for once.

They all want to see blood. But none of them want to suffer.

I survived high school. The psych ward will be a breeze by comparison. Just kowtow to the shrinks and dummy up in my room ... All this time to woodshed my art. My homies downtown would jump at a chance like this.

I got my clean well-lit place. I got my time to think. And I sure as hell found a new purpose. Besides art, that is. In a way ... you might call it the ultimate performance piece.

And it may not be as long as I think.

But on that holy day, whenever it might be, that they set me up in Transitional House Arrest and put me on work-release ... The second I'm behind the wheel of a delivery van or mopping floors at Good Sam ...

Eb didn't stick around to finish me off.

I'm already planning a little road trip.