The Illegal Leopards Story

The drums are thudding, the bass is pounding, the guitar is moaning, and I am screaming your names. This is what I live for, The euphoria of preformance, the natural high I get, straddling the audience between my legs and belting out my lyrical heart. The microphone is my chalice, the vocalist is my avatar.
Its a connection you cant possibly understand if you havent done it; Its something enchancted, something that rabbles, rouses and rebels. You didnt have to like me, but I did it, and I fought for every preformance in a sea of much better vocalists and more popular setlists. That was us, though. Pure, roots Rock. We waved one finger salutes to our conformist collegues and played sweet originals and catchy 70's songs that no one needed to know.
I remember how we reached the pinnacle, We jammed on our mountaintop in a steady stream of good ideas and better music. It was powerful stuff, we all loved it fiercly, no matter what anyone says in retrospect. It fed on the vibes, the chemistry, and it was electric, it made us feel like we were changing things, like real rock and rollers. We made music that the audience wasent supposed to like. But they seemed to like it, and if they didnt, we genuinly liked it enough not to give a flying fuck. We thought the odds were on our side. We were all so different, but we had that good old rock and roll, thats all it took, right? But maybe we werent all naive, the bassist played our swan song from day one. He's all I have left today. He sealed our fate between tobacco stained fingers with a first day prophecy, "This is as good as it gets, Its all down hill from here."
We were just so heady from the rush of descension that we didnt know we were loosing altitude. It was popular acclaim, Then it was bad shows, and suddenly, it was the descent into social pariah, and then we were dead. The drums and guitar fled while they could, but the rest of us had no escape hatch. We didnt know it yet, but starting to care had been what did us in. It was the weakness that made us susceptible to breakage, and it was the flaw that shattered us.
Whats left of us still pluck the chords from dead songs in the ditch of lost dream; they are beautiful things that you'll never get to hear, private things that are only ours. They could have been much more. I know we were falling, but we were happy, and when I crashed, I fixed my eyes on the sky, waiting for everyone else to meet me at the bottom.
But they didnt; they were picked up by musical vultures who picked off the peices they wanted
and left the rest of us for dead, manipulating the factors that caused us to hurdle to our demise.
I lay here now, in a puddle of caked dissapointment and dead songs, bruised from head to toe, and I dont know If I want to recover. Im not sure if this is Monte Christo, this just might be Rockeo and Rolliet.

But I was singing.

And If I had to do it over again,

I would.

P.S. I dont think Illegal Leopards deserved anything longer.

Cosmic Goodbye

"Im loosing you."I said dejectedly.

You shrugged. "You gave me up a long time ago."

We were in a little room, a cosmic box suspended in discordian goo. It was empty, with directionless oneway glass, two plastic lawn chairs, a solid oak lawn table, and shag carpeting. The walls were gray, except for a corncob pipe on a peg. On the end table was a clear plastic ash tray and a bottle of vodka. My glass was round and half full. You wore a black beret and little tiny glasses, a black suit. You were a beatnik and I remembered why I loved you and why I hated you too. I wore a Yeti costume. "I thought you were a Steampunk now." I said. You lit up a cigarette. "Well, Im not. Im a beatnik." You never caught it, but you were so caught up in labels. But I loved that, too.

"I miss you." I said, playing with my soft, plasticy fur. My plastic Yeti head rested on the floor beside my chair.

"No you dont. You can no longer have my undying affection, so you want it. Im not sure how you intend to have me, but you need to just grow the fuck up. The time passed. You were painful."

"You said I was worth it."

"I lied."

"I know." I said. I wished I smoked, too. Actually, I wished I was dead. I pulled off a Yeti hand and took a sip of the Vodka. It was green apple flavored. You got out of your chair and started to pace, your cigarette dangling precariously on your finger joints, your beret perched rebelliously on your head. You took a drag of your cigarette. "I loved you so much, I killed parts of me to make it go away, if thats any consolation." You reassured me suddenly. I started to play with the hair on my Yeti thighs.

"It is. I wish it wasent, but it makes me warm inside to know you have scar tissue, too."

You picked up the bottle of Vodka and topped off my glass, before retreating to the corner of the room and sinking into the crease of the wall. You looked at it thoughtfully, before taking a tentative sip. When you resurfaced, all you said was,

"Aha."

I blinked, indignintly. "You cant just say Aha. You never said that when you were with me, and you cant say that now." The Yeti costume head grunted in agreement. You took another drag, and took a slightly braver sip of the vodka you had politly procured. I took a brave sip of mine, and offered it to the Yeti head. You stared at me.

"A-h-aaaa."

I suddenly got up and I stomped my cumbersome, plastic Yeti foot. My drugs make it hard to get angry, but Im going to try my darndest.

"You know what? I left you because you were a parasite. I may have ripped peices of you out, but you were slowly eating away at the same peices of me. Your soultion to me being too much for you was to turn me into a host organism." I turned away from you.

"Im going away now. You're going to avoid me untill we inevitably cross each others path next lifetime. Just let me recover for the rest of this one."

"Eris?"

I looked at you. Your glasses were off.

"Im going to need allot more then that to get you out of my head." You say, staggering to your feet.

You put your shades back on in one akward, non fluid motion. Your beret falls off, and you dont notice. It doesnt take much to hammer you, I muse. But you knew that. You stumble towards the door, and cast a final look back at me, through those tiny, useless sunglasses. You open the door and fall into the Discordian goo, tumbling back towards your home planet. I pick up your beret and I brush it off. Thats what its always been, huh? Me stealing pieces of you to fill the holes you made, and vice versa. I finger the felt. I sure hope it was vice versa, but Im sure it wasent.

But...I must have done something for you.

I pick up the yeti head and stare into the one way glass. It purrs at me, and I pop the beret on its head.

I think about that time you read me Sirens of Titan.

And so it goes.

Whore of High School

Im not a modern day sort of girl, Im a retroville sort of whore ; Im the bad girl from the pulps that did mysteriously bad things in vaugely dirty language, the kind of girl that showed up on the covers of Kilgore Trout's Science fiction novels. And though I may have drunk this generations liqueor, but I certainly havent fucked its charmless men with disregard. They dont have enough hair, or, its not greasy enough for me. Their t-shirts are too big, and they dont know how to really look cool. Its hard to find a guy with guts to watch a good old fashioned zombie flick these days, whats a girl to do when the boy is wimpier then you are?The boys I went to school with werent my kind of scene. Sure, they wanted to fuck me. I was the whore of highschool, they felt it was their god given right. But I havent ever had a thing for that kind of guy, who loves his shoes too much and shaves his head. Dries me up like a california raisin.
But, despite the fact none of those loser where actually getting any, I was the high school whore. I wasent just that -- I was the girl with the good papers, I was the fatty, the anorexic, and the hot shit. I was the early graduate, I was the girl kicked around bathrooms.

But to boys, your either his sister, his mother, a potential girlfriend, unfuckable, or the Whore. And guess why I get a capitalization?

As the Whore, I wasent really a Lady, I was bruised up by boys I wouldent let fuck me, I was fucked by boys I wouldent let fuck me, I was all out of tears and spit at the end of the day. And it was ok, because, the Whore is almost like a faggot, to men. Just a guy with a cunt and tits they can knock around and kick a bit because she's just a fuck bag pretending she's more then the Whore you know she is. And that was me. I learned to kick and scream, and love boys who wear pantyhose like sisters, and big shouldered retro boy kickbacks.

I was hated by other girls for not belonging to tight cunt clubs and having a bad
reputation, I was honored by the same girls for not having to be a part of that club. I know what secrets and sexualitys find themselves uncloseted at the end of school years and in the dark dank hotel rooms, the beauty of dark, rolling flesh in hands and mouth, all the different fetishes and preferences a womans body desires. She's so finely tuned, and I love her for it, sacred female. And I wonder numbly why I am not the same? And the next day, they call me the whore again, and I dont hate the tight cunt club, because I pried their legs open.

I was the holy whore of highschool, and I didnt fuck anyone I went to school with that didnt fuck me by force. I wore too much makeup, not enough makeup, I was the joke, my skirt was uniform leangth, I wore pennyloafers, cardigans and maryjanes where it wasent uniform,Saucy books slipped in my school textbooks, Saucy textbooks slipped in my school books. And I can still quote the bible back and forth. So thats me, the Highschool whore. You can embroider it on the fucking sash I should have got at graduation -- Big and neon pink and obnoxious like my overbearing vulva.
Sometimes, In punnish retrospect, I wish I could have pushed through to the podium
and claimed such a shash, slipped it over my awful gown, put my hands on my hips
and proclaimed,

"I was the whore of highschool. I did things between my thighs with hands and
fiendish rumors that is stuff of urban legend. I paid prices, I laughed big laughs,
and I shook with sexual revolution without any notches on my lipstick case.The girls I went to my classes with fucked and sucked and were all out of luck with shoddy limitations and desperate pregnancies, but I was the real deal. I was the Whore of High School, and I left with the real victories."

Jeez. I wish John Waters directed my life.