The Teardrop That Exploded

I’ve met some real cookies in my line of work, but believe me, this one took the biscuit. You know what I mean? Every bar has one – the crazy old fool who inhabits the shadows, somewhere between here and eternity. And they’ve all got a story to tell. Dime a dozen desperados, all washed up and hung out to dry.

A guy on my shift said this was the kind of place to come to forget – and boy did I need to do that. There was a glint in my wife’s eye and a new pair of shoes under my bed. I think you get my drift. Let’s just say there’ll be no turkey this Thanksgiving.

It all started one Tuesday in August. I’d stepped in off the sidewalk to escape the harshness of the LA summer and the smiley happy people floating around like clouds in a candyfloss sky, seeking the coolness of the bar’s interior and its unchanging familiarity. I’d ordered my usual – beer with a whisky chaser, large and on the rocks. Perched on my usual stool in my usual place, racing form spread out in front of me, I was searching for that all elusive winner. Blue Boy in the Third had caught my eye and I was just in the process of fishing for a dime so I could make the call and lay the bet when a voice sliced through the early morning silence like a flamethrower through butter. It had a refined, scholarly tone which suggested this joint wasn’t its usual hangout. A voice that dripped with fear. The kind that clings like prickly heat. I looked up from the tip sheet to find a small man of indeterminate age, although his hollow cheeks, bloodshot eyes, cracked lips and vacant stare placed him around sixty. I watched the barman pour him another drink and his shaking hands grip the shot glass with the intensity of a drowning man clinging to a piece of driftwood. The voice was rusty, with a corrosiveness that suggested someone who had spilled the same tin of beans one time too many.

‘They’d hang me if they knew I was talking to you’.

I lifted my eyes lazily and threw him a sideways glance but, despite my obvious disinterest, he continued to talk. Although I was close enough to taste the sourness on his breath, there was a huge distance between us, as if he were a satellite orbiting a distant star. I raised my gaze an inch or two and feigned what I trusted was an air of indifference.

‘What do I care? I’m a dead man walking… brought it on themselves… should’ve thought about what they were doing... can’t change what’s happened… it’s too late now… not that they give a damn… so long as they get what they want, they’re happy… and they sure as Hell got what they wanted’

His speech was like a rollercoaster, filled with highs and lows, speeding up and slowing down, slurred words dropping off at sharp bends. If he was reading from a script then the pages were most definitely in the wrong order.

‘It was the teardrops that did it… devilishly fiendish when you think about it… I mean, who’s going to work that one out… just programme some patsy, buy them a ticket, put them on a plane, wait for the movie to roll and bingo… one less airliner cluttering up the skies… you see, just above, and to the outer side of each eye is a tiny gland which constantly makes a small amount of tears… it’s like this, the nitro-glycerine is injected into this gland which means that when they are about to cry the tears mix in with these chemicals to form a solution, so when a tear falls its party time!”

His wild intensity unnerved yet transfixed me in equal measures. I was frozen like a rabbit on the freeway. Nothing was going to stop him now.

‘Who’d have thought that nitro could do that… a hundred and eighty-two dead in an instant… and all down to a single tear… ingenious… I mean, everyone cries at something, don’t they?’

By this point I had exited the freeway and was well on the road to Nowheresville.

‘Took me a while to figure it out… didn’t see it at first… see it now though… all you need is an economy ticket and a movie… the emotions rise and the teardrop falls and BANG!!! That’s how those guys roll… they dressed it up as if it was a bunch of bearded fanatics from the Middle East – you know the kind I’m talking about… all second-hand Kalashnikovs and online Jihad preachers… but that was just a smoke screen to disguise the real villains…

Somewhere in the shadows I thought I saw the street door open and two figures enter. Maybe I should have paid more attention, but I guess you could say he had me hooked.

“They were just nobodies; transients…. literally dragged out a succession of dive bars...a bit like this one… promised a ticket to salvation…. just like The Manson Family…. they say some quack out in Redondo Beach performed the operations… they perfected a way… don’t ask me how… Guantanamo Bay or somewhere like that… you know those guys… everything’s science fiction to them…”

I was just about to order another glass of suds when a voice cut through the gloom. It was as dry as a four-day old slice of toast and twice as brittle. It belonged to a heavy set individual, six two, built like a middleweight, wearing a navy suit with matching tie and handkerchief. He tossed me the kind of look that screamed law. His eyes drifted towards the racing form and my selection.

“Blue Boy in the Third? Thought they’d shot that nag years ago.” He flashed me a grin that wouldn’t look out of place on a used-car salesman. “Say fella, you gotta light?” It was more a command than a question.

I fished in my pocket and felt for the book of strikes I always kept there. Big mistake. Somewhere behind my left ear I heard the tell-tale swishing sound of the blackjack as it hurtled towards me like a runaway express. I instinctively threw my head to the right in an attempt to minimise the impact, but it was too late. In my haste to avoid a crack on the head I caught a glass in the face. I fell from my perch and hit the floor with an almighty thud, too late to dodge the size twelve that kicked me square in the jaw. I grabbed for the foot rail, but that didn’t help. The line between fantasy and reality seemed so far from my grasp as I plunged headlong into an abyss of blackness, a bottomless pit filled with marshmallow skies and diamond-encrusted stars glittering against the blanket of night. Falling deeper and deeper into the unknown, lost in the waves of time, surrounded by nothing but my own sense of unreality. A giant toad dressed in a dinner suit served honey dew brandy from a elephant-tooth tray while an orchestra of penguins played a waltz in twelve-eight time as a crowd of electric-green flamingos danced languidly across an ocean of effervescent linoleum.

Next thing I knew I was on a plane.

They say right before you die your life flashes in front of your eyes. Well that’s what’s just happened to me. I swear every word you’ve heard is true, and what I’m about to hand you now is the final piece of the jigsaw. I’m a little hazy on the details, but I’ll tell you what I can…

I was slung into the back of a car and driven through the night. I guess I ended up in Redondo Beach with that quack. They strapped me to a gurney and pumped me full of something that made me just wanna sleep. When I awoke I was in what appeared to be a departure lounge, although it was hard to tell through the thick plastic lenses they’d placed over my eyes. I was sitting yet moving at the same time. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the scratched perspex of an advertising hoarding, and what I saw scared me more than anything had ever scared me before. I was an invalid… a senile old man with hunched shoulders and a haunted look, wrapped in a tartan blanket being pushed down the concourse by a man in a white coat. The same crazy old man in the bar who had spoken to me in what seemed like an eternity ago. Only now he was calm and collected and speaking to a stewardess… something about me being seated directly behind the cabin door, what with me being totally incapacitated and all that... told her not to make a fuss… that I wouldn’t be any trouble and somebody would be meeting me at the other end… said how I loved a good movie and that this was my all-time favourite… said it never failed to make me cry.

So this is it. The movie’s rolling and they’ve got to the part where she walks out on him. She’s just said those words. Can’t remember what, but something inside my head’s snapped. The cogs have clicked, the wheels are turning and the time bomb is ticking. I can feel the ersatz emotion welling up inside and those tiny droplets hanging precariously to my eyes like a bat to a cave. But there’s nothing I can do to stop them. Two tiny tears. Liquid bombs that are gonna blow this baby out of the sky.

See, it’s all one big conspiracy. It’s the CIA, the FBI, the NRA and anyone else you care to mention… they’re all in it together… half a dozen more of these and the President is gonna be doubling the military and tripling the budget. And that’s where I come in… their very own Trojan Horse… planted inside the city walls just waiting for the moment.

Waiting for that teardrop to explode…