I honestly pine for wet rot. I admit it. At this point, we’re so far past decay. All of it has long ago been reduced to spent kindling, sawdust and ash. It’s all dust and ash. The termites starved like one million years ago and the rats became bones and the bones are now dust. Black pilled into gray dust. I miss the rank dogshit tracked inside every night and I miss the reeking human shit smeared on the toilet seat and splattered all over the bathroom every morning. I know it was meant to be a violent show of force on his part, but I’d take it over this final stillness of the ash and the dust.

Okay, well, no, I guess I should say that I miss the reeking human shit smeared all over the bathroom before it was mostly comprised of dead house centipedes and blood. The ant colonies were tolerable when they were still living. The piles of pin-pricked used condoms in every corner of the warehouse as well. The issue, for me at least, arose when the ant hills became incorporated into the piles of pin-pricked used condoms. Basically, everything really went to shit when the pests started turning up dead and mixed all in with the bodily waste. Even still, I miss when I would brush my fingers along the drywall, finding my way in the dark halls (which always seemed to shift) and suddenly my fingers would plunge deep into a new moldy, rotten patch. I guess mostly I miss having fingers. I died in 2012. I’m a demon. Anyways, do you remember The Dead Bug Club?

The summer before we met War Leper and he killed me and I died and became a demon, it rained and rained practically all day every day. Fat, oily rain. It fell with no rhythm – strained out through some loose prolapse in the sky like hangover diarrhea or Hopkins frat boy rush week vomit. I’m making myself sick. Whatever. That summer I lived off North Ave. above the bar I bartended at and around the corner from the coffee shop I barista’d at. My landlord owned my apartment building, the bar, coffee shop and pretty much the whole block. She was pretty chill as far as old money slum lords go, which worked out well for me seeing as I was essentially her indentured servant. Not to mention I had my driver’s licence revoked the year before. My boyfriend (before we met War Leper and they started The Dead Bug Club and we both died and became demons) would come through the bar every night, get hammered for free, pass out (usually on my couch) and meet me at the coffee shop around noon the next day. I never saw his place. I never thought to ask what he did for money or even what he did all day. It was the only time in my life things finally worked in a churning, predictable cycle. It was dull, precarious and definitely a dead end, but for once it didn’t feel like I was spiraling. 

Anyways, that summer a bull escaped from the Catonsville rodeo or the Maryland Zoo or whatever and was rampaging down North Ave during yet another ubiquitous, sweaty downpour. I watched from my window. The bull charged through some poor Arabber’s cart. In case you haven’t been to Baltimore, Arabbers are these guys who sell fresh produce from horse-drawn carts. They walk all over the city and they aren’t like Amish or anything. They’re just like regular kids from the city. I guess its traditional. Well, the bull plowed through the cart, gored the poor Arabber through his torso (he bled out and died in like twelve seconds) and started raping the horse. A fatberg had recently opened up a massive sinkhole in the middle of the road and all of the sudden some Dodge Charger Baltimore PD squad car came tearing around the corner. It crashed straight into the bull, horse, dead Arabber, the smashed cart wreckage and all the smashed melons and vegetables and shit and everything just slid right into the sinkhole. The squad car, too. I could hear its sirens fade as it plummeted. I didn’t hear it hit the bottom. A whirlwind of confluent circumstances. I later found out the officer driving the Charger was one of those Gun Trace Task Force scumbags. One of those guys who killed that other crooked cop and tried to make it look like a suicide.

There was a sizzle in the air and my power went out. Putrid smoke of burning fat and powerlines and sewer gas ignition lit up the atmosphere. Rotten ghost light. I knew immediately I was completely and hopelessly fucked. I texted my boyfriend and he responded immediately: I could move in with him the next day. I didn’t see any other option so I agreed.

That winter we broke into the old abandoned coat factory trying to score some warm coats. In the dark, the heaps of hardened pigeon shit on the floor looked like ocean waves frozen in time. We were rifling through the racks of shitslicked threadbare faux-fur jackets from the 80’s and then there he was standing in the back. War Leper. Eyes like mottled cannon balls stuck in his soft, soggy wasp nest of a face. As if he laid down at the bottom of the Shot Tower and let the balls of molten lead drop down right into his head. They shone like dull pennies in the beam of our flash light. Twin spheres swivelling lazily in his rotted wasp nest skull. War Leper. In less than 30 minutes he was shuffling through the stinking gray snow, setting up his hammock in the lot behind our building.

Of course they started a noise project. My commute to and from work now consisted of 3 buses and sometimes nearly 2 hours. I would get back to the warehouse and everyone would just be posted up, 18 Natty Bohs deep planning their absurd hypothetical sets. The whole place would be hotboxed with acrid blue smoke from the shitty effects pedals and synth modules they thought they were smart enough to hand-build. They regularly mistook cockroach carcasses for Op-amps and in the dull light and through their stupor would sizzle off the bugs’ legs with their soldering irons. The smoke smelled like the fatberg sinkhole fire smouldering still on North Ave. I never ever got away from that stench.

They called their noise project “The Dead Bug Club” and they never had a set anywhere else besides the warehouse we were squatting in, and nobody ever really showed up to those. If they had any buzz local or otherwise, I certainly never heard it. They were infected. So insular and tweaked and cagey they wouldn’t discuss anything with me. Wouldn’t even look at me. I would come home stinking soaking wet from the snow or the sleet, my boots would sink into the unavoidable pats of dogshit on the floor. They’d all clam up until I went back to my boyfriend’s room. I shut the door. Immediate wet hacking laughter from the other side.

I fucking hated War Leper. Before, my boyfriend would at least humor me about my music. Maybe he wouldn’t pay attention really but he would at least let me play my demos. We never really fucked but at least he used to touch me. Sleep next to me. After War Leper and The Dead Bug Club all I got was a vacant, half cocked smile, lazy eye-roll and silent derisive chuckle. 

War Leper was always peering up at me from behind the stairs, wrapped in a moving blanket. I would hear a sniffle or a loogie being hocked from some distance above and there he was: skulking around in the rafters. I only saw him use that fucking hammock one time. So many nights I would wake up and catch him at 3:00 AM in our room rifling through my bag or my dirty laundry looking for cigarettes. It would be one thing if he was just stealing them. Instead he would lick them, suck on them and then put them back in the pack. That spring I caught him at like 4:00 AM, finally using his hammock. He was posted up in the vacant lot out back, completely soaked through by the gross rain that of course had started back up again. He was playing this stupid fyfe he always carried around with him. Rocking back and forth in his hammock soaked to the bone blowing on his stupid fyfe.

I could barely make out, through the grime on my window and the murk of the downpour, what appeared to be a roiling blue-black cloud of smoke billowing and swelling. From below it would envelop War Leper’s frame then recede in pulsing waves. I went downstairs to get a closer look. Fucking rats. A tirade of them squeezing out of the cracks in the asphalt and piles of shitty trash and leftover snow and muck. Swarming him. Had he used that fyfe to summon the fatberg? Open the sinkhole? Did he bring the rain and rats? Did he make the bull go insane? Was all of this planned from the start?

He was a mutation, leaving green footprints behind him while he paced in the kitchen for hours and hours. His grippy socks wet and black from the weeping sores all up and down his legs. Bug bites he would scratch and scratch till they opened up. Far past the point of infection. Pus and bug parts floating in my oat milk. I thought he was just drinking from the carton but he was regurgitating pus and cricket legs, fly wings, curled up house centipedes into the cartons of nice oat milk I took from work. If I had never met him maybe I could have died of an overdose or in some kind of fatally botched mugging or just by jumping off the Francis Scott Key Bridge (before that collapsed). Maybe I could have got my shit together, moved to Brooklyn and got a bartending job that actually paid something worth a shit. Instead of dying here in 2012 and becoming a demon.

I wish he would have just raped me and got it over with but one time we were squatting in the same ditch pissing next to each other at Maryland Death Fest and his cock just sort of fell off into his hand. A gentle squeeze of his fat, syphilitic, nicotine-stained fingers reduced it to mush. He just kept pissing, and dispassionately tossed the remains of his cock into an ant pile he must have been standing in for like 5 minutes. A trail of red ants followed the piss trickling down his leg up to the stump where his cock just was and straight into the gaping piss hole. One by one. I didn’t even think we had fire ants in Maryland.

All this is to say that he couldn’t have raped me even if he wanted to. But it also got me thinking about all the condoms full of cum and dead ants and blood strewn across the warehouse. If his dick was in such a sorry state then who was filling up those condoms? It should have been obvious by then that the infection had spread. That my boyfriend and the other sycophantic assholes I lived with were mutating, too. That it was happening to me as well.

They all got matching tattoos and intentionally let them get infected. Bulging ringworm Germs Burns constantly scratched at. Sobbing green putrescence. By now teeth and fingernails were piling up everywhere. Black greasy fingerprints caked onto the fretboard of the secondhand Fender Squier my boyfriend got me for my birthday. Back when he would look at me. Back when he could look at me. I found his shriveled, blackened eyeballs gathering dust in the corner of a busted road case under the stairs. I was rummaging around, desperately trying to collect loose change for bus fare. 

I don’t remember when I stopped going to work or leaving the squat. My lungs were bloated with dust and mold and the only thought I could articulate was “please, please, please dear Jesus do not let me die here.” My world had become a stinking maze of soggy drywall. Every time I felt that The Dead Bug Club had left me alone, that the warehouse was vacant save for me, I would find signs of life. Piles of steaming bug-encrusted shit, greasy guitar picks, fingernails, teeth, severed fingers and curled-up severed tongues. I figured I would never find an exit to the sinking, sucking warehouse shit world I was stuck in. That I would continue down the spiral till I was deep down at the bottom of the sinkhole on North Ave. Then at the center of my rotten maze world I would climb over the bull’s corpse and crawl into the raped horse’s pussy. There I could cry and sleep and rot and disappear forever in her womb.

Instead I eventually ran face-to-face with The Dead Bug Club. I heard them arguing. I tried to turn tail but they noticed me. Through dislocated toothless jaw and with no tongue my boyfriend screamed at me for ruining their “band meeting.” Green rageful tears streaming from his empty eye sockets and mingling with the black snot running from where his nose used to be. The Dead Bug Club circled me in the dark.

War Leper muttered something about going on tour, and that they needed someone to mind the warehouse. Make sure no other squatters took roost while they were on the road. They then pulled anything loose off of me they could, which, at this point in my deterioration included my arms and legs. They carried what was left of me back up all the way to the familiar, ordinary, rotting warehouse where we spent the last year or so. What remained of me was laid on the bare, soiled mattress where my boyfriend and I used to sleep. They poured me a glass of pus and bug milk. War Leper said they would be back at the end of the summer and my boyfriend added that when they returned, I was free to go wherever the fuck I wanted to. At least I think that’s what he said. I didn’t even have legs or arms anymore. I hoped I would starve or some organ would fail and it would finally all be over. But no. I’m still here even after the mud, blood, piss, shit, bugs and fire. I’m still in the warehouse.