I Wield My Blade With Crimson Gusto
an excerpt

1: My Poor Little Cranium

``````Hunched over a splintered table in a seedy bar, a bottom of rum in hand, I contemplate the meaning of my life and some other quite profound and compelling things.
`````` “What are you drinking?”
``````A cute girl had sauntered over to my vacant corner of the joint before hitting me suddenly with this whimsical inquiry. I briefly entertained the possibility that I had migrated to a new, friendlier bar in an unprecedentedly drunken haze. It was much more likely, however, that the girl was the oddity here.
``````“Are you even old enough to be in here?” Thus came my blunt response. She actually looked a little taken aback, offended even, by the notion that a drunken bastard hiding away in the back of a dark bar would be curt with her. My eyes found the bartender's and he shrugged apathetically, but he didn't actually do anything about her.
``````“Well, if you're gonna be like that, I'll find some other, cuter guys to talk to.” This girl who was surely the object of many young male's affections pushed off of my table with a short creak, and skated around the other rounder and better-lit tables in her running shoes, sliding out the bar's western-style double-doors and taking a left turn with her arms raised in a cute little yawn.
``````The way she did as she pleased, entering some rough establishment as she were the manager's spoiled daughter, I toyed with the thought that maybe she was. If not that, another kind of person who was a Somebody. As opposed to Nobodies like myself and the giant biker a few tables away, donning a spiked collar and tight black leather jacket in contrast with his pale, white head. Or maybe I was being unfair to that guy. He looked like a shithead, sure, but for all I knew he was just an eccentric and slightly off-kilter–but also clever and sincere–entrepreneur, taking breaks from constructing his next million-dollar enterprise from the ground up, simply to experience a lifelong dream of doing some coke and riding to Podunk, Arkansas on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
``````Just kidding. There's no such place as Podunk, Arkansas. And the guy was riding a Kawasaki bike. I'd seen it out front.

``````Some abstract thought tugged me away from my usual, pointless reveries. What was missing in this picture? Me, my filthy jeans, insufficient lighting, a possible rat infestation, a creaky chair, an equally creaky table, a bottle of Twelve Islands Shipping Company coconut-flavored rum, and a glass, which was surprisingly clean.
``````My wallet, however, was not present. Overcome by the dizzying haze of sweet coconut, it took me a full eight seconds to realize that the aforementioned, probable object of many young male's affections had snuck out with an important belonging of mine. I was quite the quick thinker. One more second had me springing out of my seat and over the table. The bartender made no effort to stop me as I totaled the seedy joint's double doors with a slam and made a sharp curve left, barely avoiding my bald-headed entrepreneurial friend's Kawasaki. So much for that girl being a Somebody, I thought.
``````I didn't even have time to get curious about whether or not I'd ever see my wallet again, because it was only one more turn before my eyes met hers once more. She was leaning against a closed shop's window, illuminated well in the soft gleam of the moon, her nimble hands shuffling through my wallet. A reaction of surprise and fear finally washed over that presumptuous face and she kicked off down the closest alleyway.

``````I was a fast guy for sure, but I wasn't used to the exhaustion of a high-speed foot pursuit that one might encounter in an action movie taking place on the streets of Hong Kong. After hopping a short fence and rounding another corner, the running had put a taste in the back of my throat like the inside of a shredded balloon. I only forced myself to keep going because I thought she was just as tired as I was. Such suspicions were confirmed when I nearly ran by my wallet on the sidewalk, directly under a streetlight. My money was still in there, as if to say, “take it all back, just please stop chasing me”. Or something like that, I assumed.
``````But I wasn't done yet. Maybe it was the alcohol flowing through me, but I wanted real retribution. I kept up the chase. I didn't really think about what that would mean doing, in the end. I wasn't going to knock the teeth out of a young girl, after all. But it's not like I could grab her shoulders, say, “Aha! Caught you!” and be satisfied with making her cry a little bit, either. I wasn't a bad guy. Could I pin her down and call her parents? Not likely.
``````So, in retrospect, continuing the chase was probably a bad idea.
``````Hindsight is 20/20, right?

``````The object of affections had disappeared behind a door into the dilapidated husk of what was once a building. I needed to stop going drinking out in the slums, but there was something special about the solitary experience in one of those seedy places. Maybe one big guy won't like the look of you. Maybe the police have just given up and stopped patrolling that part of the city years ago. Maybe a regular life just gets boring and I get it in my head that hey, I'd like to meet those unusual characters. Or I want to know what it's like to have to keep my eye out for guys trying to drive beer bottles into the back of my skull while I drink.
``````These are the things I thought about as I gave myself a running start and knocked the door off its hinge with a well-placed kick. Crawling through the wreckage, I moved past a few groaning florescent lights and gave a tug on the handle of the only one of four doors inside that wasn't totally caked with dust. It led to some basement stairs and chokingly stagnant air. Something stung at my eyes as I descended into another hallway. The place was starting to appear comparatively well-travelled and orderly looking. Was this place the hideout for a disheveled group of amateur pickpockets, or what?
``````One room I tried was furnished with a couple couches and a TV. Not some coathanger-antenna relic from the fifties, either, but an LCD flatscreen. There was also a nice looking stereo system and a pile of CDs. I decided to go in and get a better look, taking a seat on an ugly yellow couch adorned with flower patterning in favor of a posh blue one with springs poking out in a couple places. I thumbed through the CDs... Mostly there were some rather fashionable bands. Mirthmobile. Slendiff. Wait, I noticed a Chevlock album I'd never heard before. I took some headphones off the floor and plugged them in. The paint on the stereo was scratched off in several places around the headphone jack, and I imagined the thieving girl I had followed, trying to plug her headphones in during total darkness whenever the lights would flicker out in the room, failing repeatedly as if under the influence of strong spirits.
``````I mashed play on Chevlock's album and wondered how I could have missed a new release by the band. Which was exactly when a baseball bat made a hard impact with my poor little cranium.