Crack Wise With Th' Four Or Five Guys© Dept. - MrDave's Cavalcade Of Carnage

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Four Or Five Guy© MrDave [SWELL TRADING CARD AT LEFT - Ed.] promised me money if I put this up, so I say the hell with Quality Control.

The Last Day
 
It was on the morning of the 53rd day when I was suddenly jolted awake, struggling to disentangle pmac's raspily whispered words, conveyed through a spray of stale palm-wine spittle, from the rapidly fading fragments of a mostly sleepless dream of a time before, an almost forgotten world of people, places, and things indifferently observed from the relative comfort of the abandoned El Segundo flat I had been squatting in before lured … here … by the timeless siren song of wine, women, and … yes, song.

"It's time."

My stomach convulsed involuntarily despite the familiarity of the thick stench of rotting armadillo husks, leftovers from "Sunday Suppers" past, that hung in the tropical humidity like the persistent burnt-umber smear dominating the Los Angeles horizons of my misspent youth.

Apart from the incessant buzzing of flies and wheezing air-conditioner atop the luxury recreational trailer our host had airlifted here it was silent for the first time I can remember since arriving.

Five Guns West was already waiting for us at the other side of our pathetic encampment. It was a shrine to the hollow shell of modernity littered with the remnants of what we thought was important when we made the journey: crushed cans and broken bottles from the laughably inadequate supply of cheap alcohol we had been able to carry with us, deflated Dollar Store pool toys tragically ill-suited for ocean frollicking as Crab Devil (RIP) had all too quickly demonstrated, a scattering of lurid pages spared toilet paper duty from the extensive collection of Lithuanian porn that Bob had ferried from Vancouver, and of course the lifeless laptops and mobile devices overstuffed with the low bitrate pirated mp3s that our host had hooked us with like the "free" tastes of diluted dope successful dealers have always used to curate their clientele.

It was a neat trick. When billionaire industrial heir Farquhar Throckmorton III, had "thrown in the towel" on the little dog-and-pony show he ran out of the off-strip Vegas motel that had been renovated into his private playpen we had all begged him to come back. Four days later, in the hackneyed tradition of the minstrel bounding back to the stage for the "surprise" encore, Throckmorton had planted his tentpole on a private island and extended an open invitation -- a safe haven from the global pandemic that was rapidly plunging the world into mass hysteria and economic collapse. Conveniently enough, the island was also out of legal jurisdiction for the mysterious death of Ms. Myra Nussbaum, the elderly guardian of his teenage plaything at the time, who had been found floating in his pool shortly after she had shown up on his doorstep.

Like the rats of Hamelin most of us four-or-five "guys" (one of which was a real high-steppin'-stump-knocker) fell right in line when he tooted his 3-penny tin pan alley piccolo: J. Fred Muggs, One Buck Guy, Billy Mac, FivesGunsWest, Pmac, JJWombat, Crab Devil, Jack Kerouac's Cat, Kwai Chang, bk, B.B, Bill, Bob and Rob, [your name here] and too many more to count, many of whom had tried to swim the 3000 miles and didn't quite make it. Since then it had been a cavalcade of carnage as one by one our herd was thinned through what had appeared a series of bizarre mishaps but looking back formed a grand parade of atrocity presumably orchestrated for the amusement of our maestro. In spite of reverent tales of later day Grateful Dead shows he eagerly shared with us, or perhaps because of them, Rob had been the first to go.