I, Zorn: Part Three (Why a 400 Pound Elvis Kicked the Crap out of a Bionic Mother Teresa)

Think of all the dead celebrities you know. Think of them as you crouch naked in a filthy trailer, giggling in idiot monotone as a noose tightens around your neck, as images of desert war-porn flash on a giant TV screen installed by your hypertrophic dyke dominatrix. Count the number of dead celebrities you know as you gout tainted jizz and shudder in the throes of auto erotic asphyxiation.

Let's say you count twenty dead celebrities aloud, in a barely audible croak as your nipple clamps tighten and electrodes spark and crackle on the charred mound of your peckerhead. You figure those twenty dead celebrities really ARE dead but they're not. Only about half of them are wormfood, their catafalqued corpses moldering in adipocere. The rest are stuck in nine giant motherships orbiting our planet in quantum-dimensional spaces that render them invisible.

About half the dead celebrities you ever heard of are alive, if not well, in alien spaceships hovering above in hostile scrutiny. How do I know? I know because I saw them there. I saw purportedly dead movie icons like John Wayne and James Dean and Bruce Lee and Marilyn Monroe. I saw putatively dead singers like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, dancers like Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis and Ginger Rogers, painters like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro and Francis Bacon, cannibal serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. They're all up there in those spaceships singing and dancing and acting and kicking the living shit out of each other in vats of hot lava as their Reticulan overlords look on in paroxysms of noiseless mirth.

You ever watch that TV show X-Files? Sure you have. You watched it yesterday as you hung hog-tied from a metal spar in the sewage-clogged trailer of your acromegalic dyke dominatrix Helga. The X Files mythos has hostile aliens colluding with Uncle Sam in a vast conspiracy of domination, conquest and Nazi eugenics. I'm here to tell you the conspiracy is real. It exists and is fully active now as we speak across this fiberglass partition with our nuts nestled warm in a red ribbon giftsock and our outsize nipples pressed to the pane.

I know it's real because I was part of the conspiracy. Or rather, I was forced to become part of the conspiracy after my abduction that night in New Mexico. My memories of the event are clear as a kick in the nads on dry ice but everything afterwards is garbled, fragmented, hazy. I remember that brilliant circle of light in the desert, that white beam blazing down on those five Reticulans and on Elvis, James Dean and Bruce Lee. It's what I saw when I rose from a dead faint that night in the badlands.

No one spoke at first and no one moved. The silence was absolute, not even a keen of wind across the scape. Just for a second I thought I was hallucinating but I knew I wasn't. I don't feel my calves and buttocks when I hallucinate. There's no sensation in my calves and buttocks and my pecker feels gaseous or even vaguely astral, like it's made of refried ectoplasm. But there was none of that here. I had gooseflesh on my rump and I'd grown a REM sleep boner for some reason, pretty embarrassing, you don't want a blue buddha messing up your first alien abduction.

I spoke up first as usual. If I hadn't, we might've stood there forever in frozen tableau. I come in pieces, I said, if not in peace. I'd like to break bread with you guys or failing that, break wind over a narcotic peace pipe with windchimes and mantras sounding in ambient trance as turbaned capuchin monkeys serve iridescent absinthe in flutes of dark crystal. No one answered. My overture hadn't gone over too well.

I thought you guys were dead, I said, addressing the humans, but I'm glad you're not. I always dug you, Bruce Lee, and you, Jimmy Dean, and you, Elvis Presley, even though I knew you were a lousy bigot who stole his music from black people and became a fucking zillionaire while they toiled on unrecompensed and unrecognized.

They didn't answer but they did move. Elvis struck one of his dramatic stage poses, Bruce assumed his Jeet Kune Do fighter's stance and Jimmy grabbed his crotch, ran a hand through his hair and swaggered like he used to before supposedly dying in a storm of crushed metal that tore his head off and sent it sailing through the kitchen window of a nearby farmhouse straight into the cauldron of possum stew that Aunt Mae had set out for Sunday lunch. Jeet Kune Do is the martial art Bruce Lee invented after years of studying Wing Chun with Yip Man out in the urban thickets of Hong Kong.

What gives fellas, I asked, you guys planning to beam my ass up to heaven? They chuckled then, speaking in unison. You're going to wish you were in Hell when they get done with you. Hell can't be worse than what they have up there. I didn't like the sound of that but it didn't matter. I was rising butt first, floating up into that column of light. The Reticulans were ascending too, Elvis, Bruce and Jimmy in tow.

And that's where my sequential memory ends. Everything afterwards plays like an ill-recalled, gladly-relinquished dream. Not a dream. A nightmare. I learned, up in the bowels of the mother ship, that they'd been watching me a long while, tracking me from the time I left the rez on my peripatetic flogger's quest. They'd studied me, understood my shamanic power and innate genius. That's why they wanted me up there, for their program.

Over the next ten years I WAS part of their program. They systematically drained me during that time, sapped my powers with fibrous umbilical cords fastened to my chakra centers via fleshy disc mouths lined with teeth. What they sought was Agenbite, a luminous sap found in the pituitary glands of powerful medicine men. Apparently I had Agenbite stored up to my gills with more being produced every minute.

About once every week (by my calculation) I was taken off the cords and sexually revitalized by three foot female Reticulans with translucent nipples on their chins (one on each) and green lacquered lashes on their lower lids. Reticulans blink very rarely but when they do it's bottom up, not top down as with humans, and it makes a sound like a wet baseball hitting a bare gut. They're noisy blinkers, those Reticulans.

It wasn't much fun getting ravaged by three foot alien chicks but at least I wasn't forced to participate in the 'entertainments' imposed on the celebrities imprisoned in the mother ship. The celebrities had to sing and dance and even do some theater, but mainly the Reticulans amused themselves by pitting genetically altered icons against one another in vicious and bloody gladiatorial contests. I once saw Marilyn Monroe feeding on John Wayne's skull as she cornholed him in mutant replication of a female mantis.

I also saw a massively corpulent Elvis face off against a heavily muscled, anabolically enhanced Mother Teresa who put me in mind of a prune-faced power lifter in a blue and white sari. They'd fought before, those two, and Teresa had won each time but Elvis emerged victorious on this occasion. He distracted her with peeled bananas and gobs of peanut butter, then proceeded to kick the living crap out of her bionic Albanian butt with rubberized Dutch clogs as she sang Old Man River in a deep-baritone, testosterone-fuelled descant.

I never could figure out how Teresa'd ended up here in this Reticulan mother ship. I asked Jimmy Dean about it once. Isn't she, like, supposed to be in heaven tap-dancing for Pater Seraphicus and his posse of divinely jock-strapped popes? Sure, said Jimmy Dean, but there was some sort of nasty clerical error and she ended up in Hell by mistake. She was being repeatedly shredded by demon dogs in a cistern of boiling brimstone when the Reticulans rescued her, if you can call it a rescue. Jehovah should've replevied her steroid pumped ass by now but apparently he's having too much fun watching her get pounded by that tub of hog-lard Elvis.

Jimmy Dean's explanation saddened me and I wanted to weep as Teresa bawled out Old Man River in a weird melange of Bengali, Vulgate Latin and demotic Albanian but I ended up laughing myself comatose as a tittering sextet of female Reticulans ravished me in a cocoon of rotating blades that recalled a giant eggbeater. It was a nightmare like I said, a bright kaleidoscoped horrorfest that lasted a decade.

I didn't think I'd ever get out of there alive but I did. I'm not sure why they let me go. Maybe they thought I didn't have enough celebrity points to warrant a permanent berth on the mother ship. They left me where they'd found me. Or rather, where they'd abducted me. I came awake to a chill desert dawn, with the sun spreading a fine layer of gold on the mesas ranged around. I felt like a revenant, like I'd returned from the dead after eons of maggot-ridden entombment. And yet, little had changed that I could tell. I was wearing the same clothes, the same shoes, the same everything.

I didn't stop to think about it. I rose to my feet and started walking, back towards the highway and the nearest town. I knew, even as I walked, that the old life was dead and gone, that a new one would have to be birthed ex nihilo, out of nothing. I figured I was going to have to quit flogging ogres in extremis but I wasn't quite sure.

I was thinking about it in an Arizona flophouse when there was a knock on my door and three suited Feds walked in. I knew they were Feds by the way they were dressed and by their aura of subtle arrogance, the kind you acquire when Uncle Sam grants you a monopoly on violence. We know all about you Zorn, they said. We know about the people you've killed and we know where you've been for the last ten years. You killed nearabout two hundred men before the Visitors took you. You should be getting juiced in an electric chair this very minute but we've decided to leave you be.

There IS a condition though, they said. We need an assurance you're going to hang up your little flogging whip. No more killing. You start that shit again we'll come after you so fast you won't know what hit you. I smiled at that one. I can live with that fellas. No cause for worry. You hear that rustling sound? That's me turning over a new leaf. They stared down at me a minute, three pairs of freezing blue eyes fixed in scrutiny. Then they turned and walked out single file.

I never saw them again, mainly because I didn't give them cause to reappear. I returned to Pine Ridge soon afterwards and burned my flogger's knout on a patch of sacred ground. I stuck around on the rez for a while, waiting for the Call. The Call of a new path, a new life. It came six months later and I left the rez once more, wandering the country in search of weirdos. I found them of course. Found them and recorded their stories. Some of those stories were sent to Alien Wreckage but the rest are with me in this Dixie log cabin where I live now. They've remained in storage long enough. Time to dust them off and set them free here, in this space, where they belong.