Alex Vermitsky

The Road Out of Paradise Has More Traffic Than You’d Think

(the real story of Karen Ellen Kelly, survivor, killer, optimistic agnostic, KOA Hall of Fame 2053)


I played dead and I was happy 
when I was young that is, that is.

walked across the country when I was old 
and, in Texas, bartered safe passage from valhalla 

Discovered the meaning of life in Delaware 
Only to lose it to strong drink in Baltimore 

Gave Jesus a chance in the back-seat of a Buick LeSabre 
fifty miles from stabbing Michael Lee for forgetting his manners. 

Became a slave to public transportation, sleeping on the mid-morning bus 
while pretty Mexican girls played the sun on their skin. 

Oh my dearest California! your heart blood-soaked with mercy, 
how you enable these lost souls 

how you are gentle with those who burn goodwill bone dry, 
with medicines in Oakland, and absolution in El Cerrito 

how tentative is your hold on these orphans, old friend. No need to hide 
those arthritic hands, twisted with the restless sleep of your great faults.

Troubled by all the seekers seduced by paradise, only to wake up in Los Angeles 
And the thief, the killer, the junkies you have saved at the urging of their 
wino mothers 



And you look very tired, Miss Karen. Let the boy sing you a few lines. He’s an aspiring musician. A song and dance man he said. Gotta pitch in though… Everybody gotta help…


cause your family’s due at three 
there’s little time to waste
uncle Tom will climb the apple tree
swat the fruit flies from his face 

or your mom who recently divorced 
her second lonely companion 
momma ruled her home by force
and whiskey she bought by the gallon

not to mention your father the minister 
and his uncanny resemblance to God 
it's sad his religion seems sinister 
to anyone working a job

and who cares if this life brings us riches
or horses wedding-white
or even if we dig the ditches
to bury ourselves in tonight

and we sing, and we sing, and we sing, and we sing
and when our song’s over we’ll die.







The End

(Hey World Artist Network, Tom, Zach, everyone else.  Anyway first two parts.  Rest as I think them up.  Good to be back)

Riverdale

By
Alex Garrido (awesome new pen name)



Part 1

Remember when you were an asshole and actually enjoyed reading High Times Magazine, a periodical about pot you would never smoke, yet, “probably would get you like twice as high as we are now”? And remember the adds in the back of High Times Magazine for that “Legal Herb” that didn’t even look real? Remember how you spent precious moments of an already fleeting existence wondering, “how the fuck they get away with that shit?”, but sort have knew because deep down you’re not fucking retarded. I was the guy who manned the midnight shift for not one, but every fake drug company in America (there might have been one called Wizard Smoke in California). 
.
I got the job through a pretty girl I met the Cinema of Liberation or Gypsy Culture or some essential class that didn’t meet on Friday. To be completely honest with you I have very vague recollections of how it all happened. I think I was just likable and trustworthy and I knew most everyone that worked there through selling real drugs. All I remember was meeting her at he Riverdale Post Office so she could walk me up the stairs and through the always locked space on the second floor. I was then taken into a back room and seated in front of a cheap desk displaying nothing more than a broken lava lamp.

The gentleman behind that desk wanted it to be very clear he was not my boss, nor did he work for the company. Also, there would be no job interview, and my coworkers would carry out all necessary training. The only thing I had to know about my boss was that he was an avid surfer living in Southern California, and I would never see him or speak to him. He handed me a key, a manila folder with instructions on scheduling, sick leave, and basic procedures for safety. Any reasonable instinct I had to run from the arrangement was suppressed by a healthy twenty-seven dollar an hour starting wage and a complete lack of management. The courier shook my hand and told me that if I had any questions ask my coworkers, or come up with a solution befitting my B- in the Films of Woody Allen.

Orientation was conducted by the two employees who had been there the longest (6 months) the first, a Jewish kid we called Poker for reasons unknown, and the second a Puerto Rican we called Joe Donut because he liked donuts, most likely.

Joe gave me my orientation to the back room where we would mix the special formulas in industrial size shipping cans by combining the ingredients, capping the canister and simply rolling the combination across the length of the store. There was a huge instruction booklet that had about 50 pages of usable formulas, followed by scattered notes that would suggest combinations like Kava and catnip, or various exotic herbs and catnip, or catnip whatever was overstocked. I was waiting for Joe to be a dick and claim he had his way, but he mostly just kept reminding me to keep my mask on because the dust was making everyone sick.
I asked him what to do if he wasn’t there and he told me just to throw some shit together with catnip because it wasn’t going to work either way our concerns being mostly cosmetic.

The rest of our business was centered on selling Ephedrine (Mormon Tea) a now widely banned substance, to Meth-Labs across the United States. At the time on my employment only New York had laws against the drug, a minor setback considering crystal-meth had not caught on in northeast anyway. But now I’m getting way ahead of myself.

After the tour of the facility, Poker trained me on the business/shipping end of the process. Each competing, fake drug company had a color-coded phone with the name of the company on top, the thinking being we are dealing with people who are buying fake drugs and that kind of stupidity rarely learns from experience. In all honesty, we could’ve made a killing off your average “suckers born every minute” but it takes true evil genius to convince these valued customers to believe that it wasn’t the FAKE MARIJUANA that was the problem, but more so the green telephone’s lack of pride in their product that the red phone had made a priority. 

And I’m being inaccurate by saying fake marijuana because we sold every single fake drug we could think to fake: fake mushrooms, ecstasy, opium (the shit that smelled like roses you and your dumb fuck-hippy friend put on top of your weed even though you cannot smoke real Opium that way), fake Viagra, fake speed (more ephedrine) and even fake Quaaludes (which is hilarious because I’m fairly certain Real Quaaludes didn’t exist when I was in college), along with various other make-believe potions we called hilarious things like Mellow Yellow or Kind Indica something or another. 

And lastly the occasional drug themed pornography (thus Alice in Acid Land and Sally Smokes Weed and Turns Into a Gangbang Whore, etc) one awesome drug sci-fi called Ganjasaurus (look them all up if you don’t believe me) about a Godzilla type monster made of Marijuana that ate hippies (I’m not doing it justice) and finally lava lamps, the single most useless, ugly thing one could ever buy ever, period. 

And we sold a shit-load of all of it. I mean, to unload a metric fuck-ton of a product that didn’t work was amazing in an of itself, but then became downright miraculous when you consider the fact that I told these shit-for-brains hillbillies that our product didn’t work within ten seconds of the initial phone call. Something to the tune of,

“Hey man, does this shit really work?”

“No sir/ma’am these are fake drugs. If I sold you a fake car, would you expect it to work? These weeds have no known value of any kind evidenced by the fact that starving 3rd world dirt farmers willing to sell whatever it is for a little less than a dollar a pound.”

“Oh I get it, ha ha. Roger that. Give me two pounds of that shit that doesn’t work.”

And this happened every 30 seconds, give or take. But how could the customer complain when we were selling them a pound of FAKE MARIJUANA for almost 15 percent off the price of real marijuana, the stuff that actually gets people high.

And before you get your special Canadian Calculators out to do the conversion, let me grossly round down for you, and say a pound could be gotten in Harlem for $600 for peat-moss covered in Raid. Now subtract 15% of that and compare that fortune to the honorable thievery of charging a still criminal two dollars a pound, thus doubling the store’s investment something that is almost unheard of in any legal business and you have a fake-drug ass fucking of Herculean proportions. Not to mention we did this three to four times per customer

Oh, and the horror-show of stupidity does not stop there, evidenced by the second most common question:

“Is this High Times Magazine?”
“Oh, is this Hiigh Times Magazine?”
“No, this is high times magazine, right?”
“Dude, so cool your work for High Times”

Which I have to admit some subterfuge in the interest of deflecting annoying complaints to the actual High Times Magazines, a surly bunch of skinny, white, mostly-vegans that hated our fucking guts. Sadly for them the publication lived on our advertising dollars, and was very limited with their demographic of self-righteous, lazy people. 

Or the “I’ll never forget that call” involving a gentlemen who purchased our “Variety Sampler Pack “ and mixed the ingredients together to form a kind of tea which in his own blood-choked moans, was eating his organs just slow enough for him to contemplate all the reasons buying fake drugs meant this was inevitable if not today, then later today.

And I, feeling essentially the same, told him that he needed to call High Times Magazine and information would have the number if he had it in him.

And even the occasional curve ball, namely the John Dillinger that called up to inform me that he’d just stolen a credit card and, “what now?”

Didn’t need to purchase anything, just wanted some basic, criminal advice. I think I told him to buy everything in his Grandmother’s name because.

“Same name, unlikely suspect, and if she dies, case closed.”


So, I guess the obvious next question would be: how does one live with the guilt and shame of ruining countless lives?

(Later Today – Living With The Shame and Guilt of Ruining Countless Lives)


Part 2


People frequently use the word rationalization when what they really mean is contextualization. And without boring the shit out of you, I believe it’s because rationalizing suggests a cover-up of bad behavior by someone who knows what he is doing while the notion of shifting context means you hang out a sociopath who sees nothing wrong with the idea that someone must have died at his hands, the murder weapon some kind of carelessly harvested poison that violently flushes your head down your throat.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is, yes, Riverdale was a poison dust cloud mystery lab that sold ingrediants linked to the toxic state of Arizona, New Mexico, the Caruso Family, and the quick disolve of hope (the sensation) in the acid bath of "liquid-wet" (don't ask), but Riverdale also employed Prema a pretty, if a bit skinny, freshman who worked hard, arrived on time respected the customer, and briefly changed the definition of fake drug front.

I started to feel that this Indochinese gas chamber might just be absurd enough to one day make it. Sure the evacuation plan worried me, but how was I to complain when Prema sorted UPS receipts with such care, treated fake junkies so respectfully and used her breaks to collect-call her family in Indian always apologizing for the charge.

Or her lunches: rust red lamb cubes in Tupperware so small three bites would finish her 2:00am meal. 

Her conversation: light, informed, agile in any direction I moved.

And that picture of her Labrador Bowie, his face nuzzled in Prem’s heavy winter throw-over.

These were not the signs of degeneracy of moral decay and indefensible profits collected with depraved indifference for a fellow man. This was a really pathetic warehouse of useless potions and herbs softly re-imagined as Prema’s childhood in Punjab.

I felt less a almost/notreally/notatall drug dealer and more a gentle devoted husband of this delicate girl with wrists so tiny her hands appeared to float from the warmth of wool sleeves.

Until to my surprise gentle Pree approached me after cleaning the remains of her chick peas and whispered.

“Do you want to fuck me like so hard I beg for it in 3 languages?”

And I’m totally going to let everyone down here but at the time,

“Is one of those languages English?”

seemed to be a reasonable question. But if you really examine that question or even if you just read it once you’ll start to understand how I went with a combination of nonsensical “whats that got to do with anything?” and the nuanced inner cock-block of someone who had never actually met a girl in person.

And despite all that we could’ve shrugged of the momentary hiccup if my sudden interest in stereotypes of Indian culture hadn’t wondered,

“So your not arranged to anyone or what?”

And she turned to answer a phone that hadn’t even made a sound.

(Part Three Coming soon