Alligator Jack

Jack was born beautiful too late. When he was born. His skin was like that of an Alligators. So that his face, looked much less like a humans face, but like something on a tabloid that may catch a glance as you unload the cart at a check out. He was the Alligator man. Unlike his brother Jake, which has been mummified at Marsh’s free museum on display, a tourist trap of Long Beach, Washington, a great time none-the-less. Go check it out sometime if you’re up there. Jack was a fully sized upright man. Only scaly skin, and a bit of an alligators face. Jake had it the other way around, head of a human and alligator body. I’m not sure which would be better or worse, so that you had to crawl around everywhere like an alligator, or that you looked like one. It’s hard to really say what it might have been like. I reckon it’s not too hard to say. It wouldn’t be too easy of a life I imagine. Not that anybody’s is probably.
Jack mostly wore a suit and tie. He played in a band. The Rocking Croc’s with the hit song, “Everything’s a Croc”. They were mostly a cover band for Bowie Hits for the paycheck. On the side they did some of their own stuff. It was really good. Never got a lot of recognition. Lot of the best stuff never does. Things have to be packaged a certain way for mass consumption. Real stuff stays underground and often dies a small cult death. Unless it makes its way to the masses. Which then one must ask, was it ever really good in the first place? It’s a philosophical quagmire of a question my friends. They preferred to play Bowie stuff that was lesser known. They got the drunk crowds chanting along with them, “Sun machine is coming down and we’re going to have a party” at the end of the play list more often than not. Jake had got killed a while back. Drunk crossing a road. Got ran over. No one ever knew why the chicken had been crossing the road. No one knows why the alligator-man was either. I mean maybe the chicken was just drunk too and had no reason, but just didn’t get hit like the Alligator-man. I mean maybe the chicken got hit too. Maybe the chicken was a nihilist and didn’t have a reason for crossing. Maybe, being a drunk is just being a really thirsty nihilist. There will always be a lot of maybes and nobody really knows. Just was crossing you know. I don’t know you know. There are a lot of variables at play plus I wasn’t there. I mean I’m not even sure a chicken ever did cross the road. Maybe it’s just a story after all. Anyways Jake was left there as roadkill for days until he hit the missing persons reports which was a bit of a technicality at first but then they worked out the bumps and got to it and identified the body. Now every time I see roadkill. It makes me wonder, is it someone you know. It could be someone’s brother. It’s hard to ever know really. If you look real close in the museum when you see him, you may still see some tire tracks. That makes me think about chickens and peer pressure and stuff like that. If I were president, we’d have chicken and alligator crossing signs every twenty-five feet of road in every state. You know just in case and stuff. To reduce the likelihood of it ever happening again and all. It was sad and no one likes sad things. Well let’s get on with the story, looks like Jack here has something to say, let’s be quiet and hear what he has to say now, it could be really important. But what would I know. I’m only a narrator after all. They never tell us narrator’s anything.

Jack: Do you believe dreams are expressions of our unfulfilled desires or that they are trying to tell us something?
Jill: Yeah. That stuff is totally real. It’s your subconscious desire trying to express themselves through your sleep. What did you dream about?
Jack: Well, I keep having this dream where Einstein and Stephen Hawking are driving in a 56’, 57’ Cadillac, something like that. We can’t go over 10 or it will blow up and Fran Dresser and Gilbert Gottfried are in the back navigating and I’m jammed in between them and there’s a bumper sticker that says Jesus is real on the back. We’re inside these giant bins and we’re driving through like all these piles of clothes and crap and lots of denim and there’s just no way out of it really. The music is blaring Jesus Freak by DC Talk and its broke like that on that song real loud. There’s a pair of pink fluffy dice hanging on the rear-view mirror, Einstein’s driving and he has that crazy happy facial expression from the quote photos and his face is just stuck like that and everyone’s yelling and well basically that’s just what my life feels like always I mean too. That’s pretty normal right?
Jill: Holy shit. That’s messed up man. It probably has something to do with hell. Maybe you’re going to hell. And I truly don’t think there is a normal.
Jack: Yeah Maybe. I don’t believe in it though so I’m not sure if I can really go you know.
Jill: You don’t have to believe in hell for it to be real, I mean just check out the world. You don’t believe in it but half of what’s going on here or more is definitely hell ya’ know.
Jack: Yeah. Maybe it’s here because people are believing in it. You may have a point though. If there is a hell, I’m just going to cultivate gratitude real well. That way no matter how shitty it is, I’ll be enjoying myself ya’ know. Like, hey. I’m real thankful for this fire burning my ass eternally. It’s warm and it’s beautiful and I could just stare into this beautiful fire for eternity and appreciate it for that long or something, ya’ know. And I’d pretend I had marshmallows and we were just camping for a long time and I’d pretend we were making s’mores and just someone else had gone to get all the stuff. And they were just taking a real long time to get back and all. A really long time, so very long. But it wouldn’t bother me either. I would just think back on what I had read about time in an old copy of Scientific American and that it was all just an illusion really. That would probably really piss off Satan. Perhaps they’d kick me out or something. Be a threat to the system or something. Failure to conform.
Jill: That’s a pretty solid plan my friend. Pretty solid indeed. I’ll have to remember that one if I go there too.
Jack: “And you could start cultivating gratitude real well now too you know because we may already be there you know.”, he said with a wink. “Oh Shit, its Monday.”
Jill: Oh yeah. Picking in the bins.
Jack: You in a bin mood?
Jill: I was born in in a bin mood. I was literally found in a bin. I might be like a prophecy child. The bin child, come and pray at the bins for salvation, rest upon my heaps of partially soiled clothing and I shall comfort you and give you rest. Just say that the Bin lady is the way, the truth, and the only way to the truth and you shall never parish but forever have cool shit and comfort and rest in the next life. But in this life you will labor and bend over in lower-back pain and shuffle through those dirty bins and your fingers will be sodomized by thrown away soiled things and you will know no rest. I never had a mom or a dad, I just appeared in the bins one day. Bin lady bought me for the pound discount and she became my Bin Mom. A lot of people know their weights but I was $10.99 but she can’t remember what category they sold me under so my weight has always been kind of unknown. Instead of school we just picked in the bins growing up. She said bin pickin’ was the only education anyone ever really needed. She went to A.A. and had a lot of boyfriends. She’d tell her story at the AA because everyone had to listen to her but usually she’d just use it to complain about her most recent ex and was hoping to meet another nice guy on the empathy card, which was her card of play and she played it well. The Victim, I think that would be the joker’s card, because whatever they think they’re getting away with or passing over on someone, the joke end’s up on them.
Jack: I hope none of that bin origin story is true.
Jill: Yeah none of it’s true. I was just shitting you.
Jack: Yeah. Part of that dream actually may be a fear that like we never escape the bins even if we think we do you know. I mean some people think they’re too good for it or whatever. But they just don’t know how deep in the bins their lives already really are.
Jill: What do you mean?
Jack: Well, like there’s a whole lot more steps to the Goodwill Bins then you’d think. For starters the stuff hits a retail floor, after four weeks it hits the bins if it doesn’t sale. That’s where we come in you know, buy it by the pound. Liquidation attempt number one. What’s not sold at the bins is sent to auction where bins are bid on with contents not necessarily known. Then it moves to textile recyclers. One of which, S.M.A.R.T., takes 45% of clothing that no one wanted and puts it right back into U.S. clothing industry sales or overseas where markets have more demand. I mean the whole point of all these steps is to reduce textile waste because like tens-of-millions of pounds go to landfills every year right. So some of these clothes go through the whole cycle over and over and over again maybe. There could be like a Lacoste alligator polo that’s been traveling some unknown rhythmic pattern like plastic in the ocean just floating around through the system since the 60’s or something. Or you know like your dad’s old flag-pole-sail underwear or something. Then beyond the 45%, 30% get cut into rags for industrial use and 20% is processed into a soft fiber filling for furniture, home insulation, car sound-proofing and more. So it’s like, even if you ever escape the bin life, you’re furniture, your car, your home, it’s all made out of the stuff in the bins. It really is a bin life.
Jill: Holy shit, we must be in hell. Actually I think I’m going to go run and do some other stuff and then I’ll meet you for the gig tonight, does that sound cool?
Jack: Ok, sounds good. Don’t be late though.
Jill: Am I ever?
Jack: You’re always fucking late.
Jill: Yeah. Ok. I’ll try not to be late.
Jack: Hey even though we’re just friends now, do you want to kiss and keep it awkward.
Jill: You’re being super awkward right now.
Jack: Yeah ok. Whatever. I was just messing with you.
Jill: I’m not sure you were. You’re like super good with actually being awkward or messed up, I’m not sure which. I’m going to leave now.
Jack: Ok. I’ll take that as a raincheck on the kissing then.
Jill: Let’s not though for real.
Jack: You never know. Life is weird.
Jill: Ok, I’m going, bye.
Later Jack found himself in the bin life. Life has lost that wild feeling. But picking at the bins always had that wild feel. Enough to give a man some purpose. Feel alive. He’d sometimes sing his songs quietly rehearsing as he dug through for treasures. “Wild is the wind. Wild is the Wind. You touch me. I hear the sound of Mandolins. You kiss me. With your kiss my life begins. You’re spring to me. All things to me. Don’t you know you’re life itself? Like a leaf clings to the tree. Oh my darling cling to me. For we’re like creatures of the wind. Wild is the wind. Wild is the wind. You touch me.” A guy could write a book with a title like that. I bet it’d be a pretty good story too.
A guy next to Jack in the bins, started talking. His name was Mark, he was a Viet-Nam veteran, maybe. Nice guy anyhow.
Mark: I was thinking about getting into activism. Like human rights stuff. Something that’s never been done before. It’s a real shame I think no one has ever come out of the hetero-sexual closet. I think we should form a march. With a slogan, and a banner, something like “We’re heterosexual and we’re here to stay” you know. I think it’s important. I think there’s a lot more people in the hetero-sexual closet than we realize. Jack didn’t know if the guy was kidding or not. Typically people weren’t kidding when they said crazy stuff. They were just crazy. What kind of conversation did you expect from bin conversation though you know? We weren’t cultivating great minds at the bins. We were junkies of cool and retro, and trying to make a buck. Bring value back to things that had been thrown away. You had to have an eye for it. Even though you couldn’t fully see it, it was like everyone had turned into the Junk Lady in the Labyrinth inside a little. It was good that no one was shanking each other. Because that was sometimes the mood when the new bins came out. It was all the excitement of a shanking without the shanking. That’s kind of how birthdays feel too. Down in the bins, it was the best of times, and it was definitely the worst of times.
Then some other guy next to Jack that day down in the bins. Said Fuck you to Jack. “Excuse me” said Jack. “Did I bump you or something?” The guy just looked at him and said fuck you again. “Fuck you man.” The guy began to walk away. Jack yelled out “What’s you name man?” “What’s your fucking deal guy?” The guy turned around, said “My names John. You wouldn’t understand a fucking thing about it man. No, not a guy like you man. No, not a guy like you.” Jack asked what he meant about a guy like him. The guy just said “I don’t know man, just like, a guy like you man, you know what I mean? Come on man. You gotta’ know what I mean? A guy like you don’t know what kind of a guy he is? You serious my friend?” “What kind of a guy am I?”, Jack asked again. The guy said, “A guy like you will find out what kind of a guy he is soon enough I’m guessing” and laughed to himself. Then the guy said, “We’re in the matrix my friend. We’re all actors and life is a stage and I’ve been cast for the part of Fuck-You-John. God’s a writer man. God’s a fucking writer. A blow hard named London Wildheart my friend. And I wouldn’t be surprised if god didn’t exist. It’s all a joke man. And our god loves writing trash plots. So you want to know why I’m so mad. Because I got cast as Fuck-You-John man. Fuck you man, you wouldn’t understand or believe!” Then John just turned and walked away. Jack asked the guy next to him, “Man what’s that guys deal or was he on drugs probably?” The guy next to him in the bins just shrugged his shoulders and gave one of those “I don’t know” faces. Saying, “Isn’t everyone on drugs?” It would be helpful if everyone just wore those faces around all the time. Then everyone wouldn’t go around staring awkwardly at other people’s faces looking for the answers to things. If people had those faces all the time at least we’d always know we were all lost, which is at least something. I’m still looking in people’s faces for answers and truths, I seriously don’t know why. Most people will settle with someone with the dunning-kruger effect at work, just for the comfort and everything. I get it. People that have the dunning-kruger effect at work on their life philosophies make great partners if you’re into security and especially if you’re into false-security. There is no security. You may die today. If not today, perhaps tomorrow. You will not live forever. You will die. Your body will be a heaping bag of burning hot fertilizer burning then feeding the grass. One day you won’t even be remembered. Then you must ask yourself a question once you are dead and no longer remembered. Had you lived your life how you had wished every-single day? And can you be honest with yourself and that question. I hope for your sake you did exactly what you had wished every day. Because otherwise you may have been an idiot. But it won’t matter either way. Because either way. You’ll be dead, and no one will remember you one day. Jack’s hands riffled through the bins and touched something flesh like. “What the fuck?” He uncovered some stuff atop to see what it was. It was someone’s dirty-silicone-dick-squirrel. It said something on it. He cocked and turned his head to read, “Unfuck the World.” It also had a number written on it. For some reason, he wrote it down. 360-695-5452. With the touching of foreign dildo, he figured it was a good time to call it a day in the bins. Foreign dildo is probably a good term for many American travelers abroad as well. There was this guy on the way out, his name was Kerry. Looked like a real character. Jack said “How you doing man?” Kerry replied nonchalantly like it wasn’t a very important question, “I’m feeling smug.” Kerry’s smugness was also optimistic and friendly, a bit of a joker this guy Kerry was. He was a real likeable kind of guy. Especially as far as self-identifying smug people probably-go. He must have been the most wonderful and least smuggest smug person to ever have been smug. It was about time to start and get ready for the show anyways. Jack was starting to wonder a little with worry, “What the heck kind of a guy was he?” What the heck was that guys deal John? “Was he really going to find out soon someway?” that sounded bad.”
Being the lead singer and Guitar in your own band is pretty cool. But if you thought that was where Jack had the best time of his life you’d be very wrong. On Thursdays he went down to the Candy Shack, which was a LGBQT friendly bar. It was a hangout for the biggest cross-dresser and transgender dancers and performers. And on Thursdays, Jack was perhaps his most free self, Lady Candy-Cane. He stood six foot already, so with tall heels and wig, he easily towered at six-six. A six-six cross-dresser named Lady Candy-Cane that dances and sings and is feeling her best is quite the full of life creature when the sun goes down. Lady-Candy Cane didn’t identify with any of the labels or sexual orientations. She said it was all too fucking confusing for her. She just loved to fuck and make love and Lady Candy-Cane had a no discrimination policy that came with that. She fucked and got fucked by everything and everyone that fucks probably fucked and came with her. Chad had slept with him, or her, or both? Which was really just Dahlia. Chad was just a creation of Dahlia’s mind to mess with homophobic guys after they bought Dahlia’s love. But Lady Candy-Cane had special requested Chad to the party, and in some type of a sex-fever dream Chad showed up surprising. Lady Candy-Cane and Chad must have got in the record books and maybe made a record in uninhibited freak sex acts ever had of all time. Dahlia had enjoyed it all very much. So did everyone else. When Friday came around. A shower and a whole lot of washing his face. He was back to being Jack. For the other six days of the week. And there was no discrepancy in how it worked out for him and her. Jack and Lady Candy-cane were living the dream for themselves. Now Jack didn’t look like an alligator anymore. Because when he was in his teens he had several facial surgeries. But growing up he had got teased a lot for looking different. Like an alligator and all. So even though it was a beautiful man that was in the mirror every time he looked in it. That’s never what he saw. He always just still felt like that alligator boy everyone had teased. Some things surgery can’t fix I guess. Sometimes the cross-dressing carried over into the week and on stage, Jack the alligator man, lead singer of the Rocking Crock’s, would be belting out those David Bowie hits, in high form. All while wearing Lady Candy-Canes panties or something like that. A lot of them had alligators or crocodiles or something like that on them too.
They were at a hotel a few hours away. Jill was at the bar setting up. Jack checked the drawers and wrote in a bible he found there. Under the cover, first page. “Jesus died for your sins. He resurrected himself when he realized everyone were too big of idiots worth dying for. Have fun with your sins idiots.” Jack was an atheist and religion left a bad taste in his mouth. He had grown up having O.C.D. thinking it was demons. So. Plus he just didn’t believe in gays and transgender being mentally ill or whatever or sinning. He thought the evangelicals with their lack of working empathy and lacking intelligence was the true mental illness. If there was an illness. But there really wasn’t. There was just gay and transgender people trying to live normal loving lives while being able to be themselves unobstructed by hateful-ignorant people. Then there were hateful-idiots who identified with the majority and the church, living their precious ignorant bubble lives around others who could reinforce their harmful-ignorant-hateful beliefs. Even the gays had to storm a American Psychiatric Association meeting in the seventies to fight for their rights, and getting the DSM to eventually remove being gay as a mental illness and pathology. The APA sought to de-legitimatize anyone except itself. Slowly fully diagnosing the whole of human behavior as disorders and mental illness. The funny things is they had got it right on accident. Everyone with a mind was really mentally ill in a way. There just was never going to be any cure for it, sure as shit no medicine. Better to think of it as abstract thinking and creativity than what it really was. Everyone was actually insane. Whether they knew it or not and it was definitely a spectrum with harm and non-harmful insanity. I prefer the non-harmful myself. I guess one could think of it as the cosmos is what your heads made of and there is some type of quantum mechanics at work. Sometimes things are there, and sometimes they’re somewhere else, and that’s all I know about it. Anyways with the A.P.A., as long as everything could be put in neat boxes and categorized and named and a medical model based on SSRI theory that had never been proven could remain in place for indefinite profit, there would never be a cure. The only cure was to opt out of the current medical understanding of the American culture at this time. Which as his therapist might annotate, Jack had stopped taking his Zoloft and was exhibiting slight-paranoid-delusional behavior. Either that or he was very intelligent and capable and was really on to something. Claiming your own paradigm in an existence where they are laid like traps before you is something one must eventually do.
On stage between songs Jill and Jack were talking about serious stuff. Jack had never felt that he fit in being an Alligator-man. Jill was telling him that that wasn’t why he felt different.
Jill: “Jack, You and I are actually Martians. You’re here for reproduction of our species with me later.” Jack liked hearing that. “The human species is a slave race we genetically-modified for docility with the special purpose of terraforming the planet, 34,016. We have to go soon. Those things marketed with the great tag, “Smartphones” are actually causing brain cancer and mental retardation throughout the whole species. Some more than others obviously. Trump is going to get reelected and blow the world up with nukes if Democrat’s don’t agree upon a candidate. We always create a Trump gene that is severely mentally diminished in capacity from the get go. Over time, every time the people start electing the Trump genes into political offices and leadership positions it’s a marker that the population has hit a critical-mass of idiocy. That’s our canary in the coal mine. They kill themselves every time. It’d be nice to see them get it right one time but it hasn’t happened yet. They always populate too much, get selfish and their ego’s destroy the world with good intentions often too. Anyways, let play one or two more songs. There’s a space ship out back. It’s time to colonize the next place. What do you want to play?
Jack: “We are in hell. But it looks like the rain-check is getting cashed in then huh? Ok. Well, Folks, Last song of the night. This is “Memory of a Free Festival” we hope you enjoy the rest of the evening, get home safe, tip jars still open and feel free to sing along if you know the lyrics.” As the song went to its close, Alligator-Jack, the cross-dressing Lead singer of the Rocking Croc’s, with OCD and his own paradigm, thought about his favorite activity he’d miss. Not the sex or the band. Freakiest thing he did was be a pastor on Sundays. Those believers were the craziest wild bunch he had ever found. He sure would miss all that silliness. Especially all the hypocrite ones hating the transgender and gays on Sundays and then seeing them cross dressing themselves on Thursdays and back in the sex rooms Lady-Candy-Cane danced at down at the Candy-Shack. Life wasn’t hell. Life had been much more like one long peyote trip that was kind of really bad at parts. It was a trippy spirit journey.
Jill: I was thinking Jack. You know Martians. They live for thousands of years. We still have most of our time left. It takes a few hundred years to get the humans to a population of resource terraforming before their manufactured extinction event. I know you’ve always been quite the wild man. But how would you feel about settling down with me and having some kids and a farm. We could even start a family band, maybe even still call it “The Rocking Crocs” but let go of the song, “Everything’s a Croc.” How do you think that might sound?”
Jack: Jack looked at Jill. He’d finally found a home. “I’d like that a lot.” Jack replied. Looking into Jill’s eyes and knowing, he loved her. And in loving her, was the only way he could know his real self. He was built to love someone, & it turned out to be Jill. How strange he thought. The planet soon blew up as the Martian ship, disguised as a School bus had flown away.
On the long Journey through space, as the School bus careened towards its next adventure in a galaxy far away, Jill looked into Jacks eyes. Just as surprised herself. She knew she was deeply in love as well. She said. “Jack, …this feels magical.” Before she could end, he reached in and kissed her. With rain checks cashed in, through the school bus windows looking in from the black-vastness of space. There was a man named Jack the alligator-man who looked like he was having the time of his life. Kissing a girl. A girl who loved how he was. She wanted to know sometimes how he was so great. For others to know he eventually wrote a book, about how he had lived his life by just three values. To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and civilizations. And to boldly go where no Alligator-Man had gone before. The music played as they made out and flew off nearer their next colonization, “The Man Who Sold the World, Loving The Alien, Life on Mars?, Rock N’ Roll with Me, and Memory of A Free Festival, as they flew off into the final frontier, making space babies of love, Martian style. “Sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party. Sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party. Sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party.” A bit further out there was another Martian vehicle flying somewhere else. A Jeep Grand Cherokee, the license plate read Bethany. It was known as The Bethany, and it was a pirate ship time machine. Inside whoever it was, well that must have been a pirate captain then. Perhaps a god or a guy living as a real life pseudonym named London Wildheart, or a guy that was just a pseudonym of a man, or a guy having a long good joke to himself named Joe Doyle, or someone that became something totally beyond named a London-Joseph. The way quantum mechanics works, some people if anyone had been looking, may have seen a group of people in that jeep at times. I don’t know how that could be but I don’t understand quantum mechanics very well, I’m not sure anybody really does. Truth always really is stranger than fiction. Well that guy or those guys, whoever it was or the bunch of them, Captain and crew flew in that Pirate ship, reading some Harry Potter books, and eventually I heard, got them finished and enjoyed them very much. A song played in that ship too. Boots of Spanish Leather by Bob Dylan. “Well there’s nothing you can send me my own true love. There is nothing I am wishing to be owning. Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled. From across that lonesome Ocean.” Bob Dylan had been born Robert Allen Zimmerman. On a name change, he had this to say. “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.” Now I would say on top of that I have great parents and sometimes you just do things for kicks and to have the time of your life and live the life of your dreams. And sometimes you do whatever you have to do to survive and make it through things. To inspire others is nice, but the greatest accomplishment I think has always been, to inspire one’s self. The music continued as that pirate space ship flew on. Whoever it was in there would be just fine. But he was a bit worried about everyone else. But their lives were their own responsibilities and crafts.
“Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine
Made of silver or of golden
Either from the mountains of Madrid
Or from the coast of Barcelona
But if I had the stars of the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
For that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’
But I might be gone a long old time
And it’s only that I’m askin’
Is there something I can send you to remember me by?
To make your time more easy-passin’
So take heed, take heed of the western winds
Take heed of the stormy weather
And yes, there’s something you can send back to me
Spanish boots of Spanish leather.
Oh, I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin’
Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again
It depends on how I’m a-feelin’“.