"It's alive," screamed the avocado as it driveled down the hallway into the crack at the end of the hall. It's not my fruit cried Loretta, a pudgy faced chick who never owned a dime in her life. Let's grab it. Well I don't know, what if it fights back. Right then Loretta digressed a bit.
"I was five years old when the plague came to town. It came in like a big avocado. It left people green. Yup, it left people green. We cleaned the bodies up. It took a long time but we managed to burn the corpses, bit by bit, into charred slime."
She came back to the present time. The air was warm. So was Tom. What do you think, right here. I don't know what about the plague and AIDS. We might die. What of it.
But then again, what if avocados themselves were the root of all evil? What if Satan himself was really a California avocado? One could walk into a Safeway anywhere in the world and take home the prince of darkness, and try to make guacamole out of the personification of evil. Then none of it would matter, for she loved guacamole so much, that even if she knew that it could spell eternal darkness, she would eat it anyway. As she lay there she suddenly felt a craving for the wretched green party dip. She got up and went into the kitchen...
"So my friend, you say that you love guacamole. Well I have got a deal for you...I will give you three wishes and a carload of the old Guaco baby...You know, the kind that gets you when you are just beginning to fall asleep at night, yea, then, and only then will I come through with your wish...Your wish to eat the green Guacamole of youth. Yea, with a Capital G as in GGGGuacamole...You want to be young. You want to be able to fuck Tom yet one more time--the second wish, I am sure. You are so dumb, that I bet you will take me up on my wish. Do you listen to your soul, oh, no. I am in your deepest dreams. I crawl in your darkest thoughts. Fuck Tom. Fuck Tom, you say. But, I, the guacamole king with a Capital G still wins. Yea."
And she recoiled in terror. How, how could a simple avocado, and not a particularly ripe one at that, know her deepest thoughts? How indeed, answered the avocado, as it lay there on her kitchen counter.
"I know all, and you, without even knowing it, have stumbled across my secret...Yes, I am the prince of darkness. Actually, I could be any fruit or vegetable that would be appropriate, but for you, my dear, it was the California avocado."
Her mind was spinning. She hadn't eaten but two tabs of LSD, and that was hours and hours ago.
"No," said the avocado, seeping into the darkest corners of her soul, "I am not a mere hallucination...nothing as real as I am could be here simply as a side effect of that simplistic drug you worship so."
It was that moment that Tom, delicious Tom, came wandering into the kitchen...
"Ha!" exclaimed Loretta with swirling eyes, "You're there swinging your ego. What do you think, huh? I was told that we might be wanting to get something together. Get back. I dig black as in plague slime."
Loretta became one with the dirt at her feet. And it was good, she thought. If I could just go deeper, deeper into the bowels of what I abhor the most. In the dredges of my past...into the deep plagued slime with Tom and the Avocado god of my dreams. They went down the old, hardly used road, for days without water. After four days they dropped into one exhausted, fucked, humped and they were psyched and fucked up. The path was lost. They had no more water.
"What's that sound?"
Yup, you guessed right my friend, it was indeed the water from the prince of darkness himself--Avocado man.
"I am water," he screamed.
They wandered down the path towards the sound, losing their way occasionally but always ending upon a path towards the water of their dark souls.
After another three days of walking they came upon the green blob who disappeared down the crack at the end of the hall a week ago. And a long and depressing hall it had been too. For Loretta had never understood what depression could be, until that hall, and the crack at the end into which crawled the thing that she despised the most. As much as she hated Tom, this was something worse, for years ago, this hall had been part of her. This hall, that she trod upon every day...fucked up. Junk, how many pounds?? No way to tell any more--acid sheet after sheet, day after day interrupted with week long drunken binges, and she had finally ended it all in that hallway. The lights on the ambulance had been beautiful, the last thing she would ever see in this deceased physical existence. She had come back to even brighter lights not nearly as beautiful as those that were to be her last. And the hall still stretched out before her. And now, now there was the green. The green that would not let her be, waiting...
Fucked up, yea, and worse than any other. Worse than that hall so many years ago. I saw the strip in front of her eyes the first time she snorted that shit in the hall. The avocado man with his evil intentions placed the mirror in front of her greedy face with a vengeance for things done in the past in Oregon. The hall, the hall, the hall was long. And if she traversed the whole length would she live to snort another day. Could she live til the end of it?
"I doubt it," thought the Avocado man as he pondered the situation.
What, three more steps, the hardest steps? Back to the cave of lust for TOM, TOM, TOM. She fell deep deep into her clutch. Yes, she grabbed him, him in her arms. She was the Avocado Man's, the man who kills all men. The woman who kills all souls. The man who kills all women. And I will watch you all with my three eyes. The roots of darkness which stare at your whitened eyes.
"You say yes, I say you're right. That is what you wish to have most of all. Fuck Tom you say. Grab him in your arms and you will know the sin of your deeds in my, and only my, tunnels of darkness. You say you seek the waters of your lust to survive. Wrong you are. It is the light of the Aboveground that you should be seeking. You ran out of water on the first day, and the Avocado Man showed you what. What did he show you my perverted friend? He showed you a way deeper than anything you have known before. He says that water runs ever downward. Ever downward until it is too late. But, I will tell you this, the sun shines from above.
Loretta looked up the tunnel where she had come down several days before and realized that there was indeed light there. A green sickly light, a light like no other, it was as if someone had taken an incandescent bulb and coated it with guacamole, that wonderfully weird party dip that she adored so. If only she had a chip, she could just hold it under the light and she would have guacamole forever...eternity. As she leaned towards it, the avocado that lay so normally on the kitchen counter, she became aware of Tom. He was there, with her. In the hall, in the tunnel, under the sickly green light, and, closest of all, in the kitchen. She could smell him, feel him and she hated him. And yet...
"But wait," said the avocado, "could it be? Are you really that far gone, that fucked up that you would trade an eternity of green for that fucked up bastard?"
It had gone on forever. Tom...and the junk, she hated them both and yet they were so wonderful, the ambulance lights, Tom's face as he came inside of her, they were so beautiful. And the sickly green light grew greener, and she was confused...the avocado seemed to grow, but no, or was it. Tom sat down and lit a cigarette, and the blue smoke curled upwards towards the green light...the result was awful.
Upward, upward as she rose in harmony with his pulsing spirit. They climbed higher than a man could travel alone. To the land of daisies they wandered with their spirit. Six feet high they rose, with stems of green, flowers of purple. They wandered around through the purple daisies. How bizarre, I will say. And Avocado Man with thoughts of dark, will you interfere with our young lovers. Will you interfere with the cigarette of their love. They are drifting; they are drifting farther than you will ever know. They are drifting farther than you, with your mind in the gutter of darkness--it is beautiful. It is the purple of life. It is brighter than you will ever know Gutter Man. You worry about the junk and the hall. You worry about what Avocado-Gutter Man has told you. He will tell you anything to fuck up your mind. To fuck Tom. To fuck up your mind, to fuck up Tom. What is the difference, my friend with nothing in the head. What is the difference. The tunnel is dark. The hall was filled with junk and coke. Coke means life. Coke brings life. Coke kills life, and the man will be with you all the time. Fuck Tom, he tells you. Is that what you want, or do you just want your junk?
And if I was to tell you about the daisies, with purple at the outside and yellow at the inside, would you tell me that the tunnel was fucked. Coast over the sea of shit. Coast over the tunnel. Remember, when the weather gets rough you will try and think of Tom. Fuck Tom. Climb into the roots, my friend. They stare unendingly at your soul. The tendrils are reaching out at you as you ponder the three spots that you might wander to. Will you go there, or will you try to stay in the junk glow of the Talking Heads.
And her head spun like it had never spun before. All the junk in the world could never spin her head the way that it spun now. Tom sat patiently, and the blue smoke curled ever upward. As she drifted back into the avocado, she felt queasy. Was it really the truth? The hall, it reeked of...of what? Guacamole? Puke? She couldn't tell anymore. It was all too real, too true, it was here now in her kitchen, and she grabbed at the counter as her head spun with daisies, dime bags, the hall and parties with bowls of heavenly guacamole on coffee tables.
Much later, as the sun shone though the windows, as she wrapped her legs around Tom's hips, she wondered. She wondered if she would ever walk down her beloved hall again. Whether she would ever again go to a party with coffee tables laden with the weird party dip.
As they were fixing breakfast, she noticed that the avocado was gone.
Mark Whitaker and Scott Haugaard maintain that this piece is the fine product of a severe drunken binge of two sick and twisted youth. See what drugs will do to the minds of today's youth?
For other stories by Scott Haugaard's wife, Brenda Munroe, click here.
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