“I’m not sure I want to take the time to—”

For a brief moment, I considered taking it easy on Arnie. Then I remembered the grin. I unloaded.

“Last night you had a dream, Arnie. You were being chased through a forest by your mother. She was lashing you with a whip made of knotted penises.”

Arnie’s face fell, like an imploded building. As much as I hated the expression on his face a few minutes ago, I loved this one.

That’s right, Arnie. Everything you know is wrong.

“You got my attention, Mr. Wong.”

“Oh, it gets better. A lot better.”

Bullshit. What it gets is worse. A lot worse.

“It started a few years ago,” I began. “We were just a couple of years out of high school. Just kids. So that friend of mine, John, he was at a party . . .”

JOHN HAD A band back in those days. The party was happening Woodstock-style in a muddy field next to a lake in a town a few minutes outside of Undisclosed city limits. It was April of that year and the party was being put on by some guy, for his birthday or whatever. I don’t remember.

John and I were there with his band, Three-Arm Sally. It was around nine o’clock when I strode out onto the stage with a guitar slung over my shoulder, greeted by a smattering of unenthusiastic applause from the hundred or so guests. The “stage” was just a grid of wooden pallets laid together on the grass, orange drop cords snaking underfoot from the amps to a nearby shed.

I glanced around, saw a set list taped to one of their crackly old Peavey amplifiers. It read:

Camel Holocaust

Gay Superman

Stairway to Heaven

Love My Sasquatch

Thirty Reasons Why I Dislike Chad Wellsburg

Love Me Tender

We took our places.

It was me, Head (the drummer), Wally Brown (bass), Kelly Smallwood (bass) and Munch Lombard (bass). John was lead guitar and vocals, but he wasn’t on stage, not yet. I should let you know that I had no idea how to play the guitar or any other musical instrument, and that the sound of my singing voice could probably draw blood from a man’s ears, and perhaps kill a dog outright.

I stepped up to the mic.

“I want to thank you all for coming. This is my band, Three-Arm Sally, and we’re here to rock you like the proverbial hurricane.”

The crowd muttered its indifference. Head hammered the drums for the intro to “Camel Holocaust.” I slung the guitar around and got ready to rock.

Suddenly, my whole body wrenched in a display of unbearable pain, knees buckling. My hands shot to my head and I collapsed to the stage, screaming like a wounded animal. I scraped the guitar strings to throw out some painful, spastic feedback on my way down. The crowd gasped, watching as I flew into a series of exaggerated convulsions, then finally lay still.

Munch rushed over, studied me like a paramedic. I lay there like a dead man. He touched my neck, then stood and turned to the mic.

“He’s dead, ladies and gentlemen.”

A rustling, drunken panic in the crowd.

“Wait. Please, please. Everyone. Pay attention. Just calm down.”

He waited for quiet.

“Now,” he said. “We have a whole show to do. Is there anyone here who knows how to sing and play guitar?”

A tall man stepped out of the crowd, a head of curly long hair like a deflated afro. This was John. He wore an orange T-shirt with a black stenciled stamp bearing the logo of VISTA PINES FACILITY FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE. The last two words had been crossed out with a black Magic Marker and the words NOT INSAN were scrawled crazily over it. The whole shirt, logo and all, was John’s handiwork.

“Well,” John said, in a fake Southern accent, “I reckon I can play a little.”

Kelly, according to script, invited him onto the stage. John pried the guitar out of my dead hands while Head and Wally dragged me carelessly off into the grass. John picked up the instrument and tore into the “Camel Holocaust” intro. Three-Arm Sally began every single show this way.

“ I knew a man

No, I made that part up

Hair! Hair! Haaairrr!

Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”

That whole bit was something John had come up with, the man having a terrible habit of carrying out his drunken 3:00 A.M. ideas even after daylight and sobriety came. It was always 3:00 A.M. for John.

I turned onto my back and stared into the night sky. That’s what I remember, from that last moment of real peace in my life. The rain had ended hours ago, the stars freshly cleaned and polished against their black velvet background. The music thrummed through the ground and the cool moisture of the grass soaked up through my sweatshirt as I gazed into the twinkling jewels of infinity, all spit-shined by God’s shirtsleeve. And then the dog barked and everything turned to goat shit.

It was rusty red, maybe an Irish setter or a red Labrador or a . . . Scottish rust-dog. I don’t know my dogs. Ten feet of thin chain trailed off its collar. Bounding around the partygoers, a bundle of manic canine energy, drunk on the first freedom of its life.

It squatted and peed on the grass, ran over to another spot and peed there, too. Marking this whole new world as its territory. It came toward me at a trot, the chain hissing through the grass behind it. It sniffed around my shoes, decided I was dead, I guess, and began snuffling around my pockets to see if I had died with any beef jerky on me.

It recoiled when I reached up to pet it, a catty “don’t touch the hair” look on its face.

A brass tag, on its collar.

Etched with a message.

I’M MOLLY.

PLEASE RETURN ME TO . . .

. . . with an address in Undisclosed listed below. At least seven miles from home. I wondered how long it had taken the animal to etch that tag.

The dog, having nothing else to gain from our relationship, trotted away. I followed it, deciding on the spot that I would load up the dog and return it to the owners, who were probably worried sick about it. Probably a family with a little girl, crying her eyes out waiting for it to come back.

Or, a couple of sorority girls dealing with their grief through a series of erotic massages . . .

It’s hard to look cool chasing after a dog, especially since I sort of run like a girl anyway. The dog pitched annoyed glances back my way as I trotted after it, picking up speed each time. I wound up taking a circuitous path all the way to the other side of the field, where I heard something that turned my guts cold.

A shriek. High-pitched, almost a whistle. Only two creatures on God’s Earth can make that sound: African Grey Parrots and fifteen-year-old female humans. I spun around, moved toward the commotion. The dog seemed to eye me carefully, then ran off in the other direction. I looked around—

Ah. Giggling now. There was a bundle of girls, away from the stage, huddled with their backs to the band. They were surrounding a black guy with dreadlocks, an overcoat. He had one of those Rastafarian berets on his head, definitely going for a look, wanting the attention. Two of the girls had their hands over their mouths, eyes bulging, screaming for the guy to do it again, do it again. From the reaction I figured I had just encountered the most dreaded of all partygoers: the amateur magician.

“Oh my gawd!” said the nearest girl. “That guy just levitated!”

One girl looked pale, on the verge of tears. Another threw up her hands and walked away, head shaking.

Gullibility is a knife at the throat of civilization.

“How high?” I asked blandly.

The Jamaican turned his gaze on me, trying to pull off the piercing stare of the exotic voodoo priest. It was an expression that was supposed to make me hear theremin music in my head.

“You gotta love the skeptic, mon,” the guy said in a rubber accent that was part Jamaican, part Irish and part pirate.

“Show him! Show him!” screeched a couple of the girls.

I’m not sure why I feel the need to rain on this kind of parade. I like to think I’m standing up for skepticism but in reality I was probably just pissed that this guy was going to have sex tonight and I wasn’t.

“What, about six inches above the grass, right?” I asked him. “Balducci levitation? Made famous by magic hack David Blaine in his television special? All you need is some strong ankles and a little acting, right?”

And a stupid, drunken audience . . .

His gaze froze on me. I had a familiar, nervous sensation, one that goes all the way back to elementary school. It’s the simultaneous realization that I may have talked my way into another fistfight, and that I had not spent any time learning to fight since the last one. In a town where Friday night bar brawls make the Undisclosed emergency room look like the aftermath of a Third World election, sometimes it’s better for smart-asses like me to just keep walking.

Then, he broke out in a big, white, toothy smile. A charmer.

“Let’s see . . . what can I do to impress Mr. Skeptic Mon? Ah, lookee there. You didn’t wash behind your ears, did ya?”

I let out a loud, theatrical sigh as he reached out to the side of my head, presumably to pull out a shiny quarter from behind my ear. But when he pulled back his hand, he was holding, not a coin, but a long, wriggling black centipede. He let it dangle over his fist, turning his hand over as it crawled around and around. One of the girls squealed.

He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, held the wriggling thing up for everyone to see. I noticed for the first time he had a few layers of first-aid tape wrapped around his other hand. He passed this hand in front of the bug and in a blink, the centipede was gone. The girls gasped.

“Well, the bug was a nice touch,” I said, glancing at my watch.

“You wanna know where it went, mon?”

“No.” I wasn’t feeling well all of a sudden. This guy was giving me an odd feeling in my gut. “But, you know, don’t get me wrong. I am one entertained son of a bitch.”

“I got other talents, you know.”

“Yeah, but I bet all your really good tricks are back at your apartment, right? And you’d be happy to show them to me, if only I were sixteen and female?”

“Do you dream, mon? I interpret dreams for beer.”