This is the (long and breathlessly awaited) Third Installment of the Burlington Story. If you haven't, I suggest you go back and read Part I and Part II for the reasonably important background. Not to mention my incredibly fabulous descriptive prose.

All throughout the summer and into the fall I would go with S. to Vermont to hang out with D1 and a bit of CJ. I believe I need to describe this cast a little bit more.

I have already described S. at some length. Suffice to say for this tale that she was adorable, insane, damaged, selfish, and impossible to resist.

D1 was and still is a strange confluence of characteristics. He is a pretty smart guy, as far as that goes. He hung around my school for a while, although he never actually enrolled, which is how I knew him -- through the friends he had made at that point. He is a bit of a strange looking guy, and was then too. A very short face between the eyes and the lower lip, and a fairly long forehead and chin. A wide nose. Varying hair length and color. The sort of person the security guards always double-check and the store detectives follow around. Sweet person. Always full of schemes, especially with E. These people will all be hard to sufficiently describe, but I have to try to paint some sort of picture. D1, E., and I all had matching fedoras, and we all had trenchcoats, though those didn't match. We wore black jeans and jackboots. Sometimes though S. and I would wear our much funnier hats -- I had a velvet jester's hat, complete with bells, and she had a very, very long velvet pointy cap that trailed practically to her knees with a little tassle on the end. D1 wore bells on his boots so we always knew where he was.

E. was then and is now tall and flat. I don't mean skinny, I mean *flat*. Like a board. Gangly, but in a plankish sort of way. When he danced S. and I laughed and called him a water skeeter. It was quite dangerous to be on a dance floor within a ten-foot radius of E. E. could hardly stomach dex -- not that it was pleasant for any of us -- and later on in this story he made D1 cook up a huge batch of dex candy (boil it down then bake) but it got burnt and he wound up drinking the cough syrup anyway. The smell of the cooking dex was horrific, S. and I had to leave the house for a good solid 10 hours, and to this day I cannot stand the smell of burnt sugar.

CJ, the quadripledic, was another character. He had some use of his hands, although they were bent in and the fingers were mostly stuck together. He used to make wax sculptures (hideous) out of candle wax and using a palette knife. Some other bad art as well, but I forget it. He also had the worst taste in furniture I have ever seen. He was a sweet man, however. He was 31 when I met him, and he had been paralyzed for almost exactly half his life. From a diving accident (ie, dove into a shallow pool and snapped his spine) when he was 15. By the time I knew him, he had completely made his peace. He had a long, white, tobacco-stained beard and terrible teeth. He smoked Pall Malls out of a cigarette holder, which he needed in order to grip it with his only semi-functional fingers. He had a motorized wheelchair we took for joyrides when he wasn't using it that went 35 mph and made great wheelies. He loved Jameson whiskey, and would tool around town in his chair hitting the bars and flirting with women, who of course even he knew wouldn't go home with him but were too polite not to flirt back with the cripple. He had extremely long socks.

W. has not yet been mentioned, and I am unsure whether he will come up in the rest of this story, but he is worth describing. He was very short, maybe 5'3", and a little paunchy. But nowhere NEAR as fat as he used to be. This guy had a STORY. He is the only person I have ever met (at least partially because everybody else died) who had gotten hit by a Mack truck. It happened when he was 14, and his fat saved him. Literally. The doctors told him that if he hadn't had as much fat as he did to cushion him, he definitely would have died. Whe I met him he was 9 years or so sober, having practially lived on crystal meth before. Due to the meth, he had no teeth, a fact I did not know until I found his forgotten dentures (full set) in a glass in the bathroom one evening. He somehow also managed to remain morbidly obese while doing crystal meth, which I did not think was possible. He lost it after quitting. He had an enormously fat wife, and an *unbelievably* fat and stupid daughter named Amber (good god) who I SWEAR to GOD was 300 pounds at age NINE. Dumb as a fucking post, too. But W. was sweet. Once I offended him while S. and I were watching a movie that was close to our hearts by telling him to please go away while we watched it. I apologized profusely. He gave me my cat, my first and eldest child. Also I somehow always associate him with the Jack of Hearts but I cannot for the life of me remember why.

E.'s girlfriend was and is amazingly beautiful, and has no part in the story really, but I thought I'd mention her anyway, cause she's hot. Unfortunately for all involved, she's also getting crazier by the minute.

Our next-door neighbor in Burlington was M. M. and D1 had known each other in prison, and D1 had gotten him this gig. He wore Star Pants, and any white trash reader or white trash knower will understand what I'm talking about. He had a mullet and a serious heroin problem. He celebrated his parole by hiring a couple of hookers and dosing a whole shitload of his patient's morphine. He OD'd, having not had a hit for many months, and the hookers threw him in the cold shower, nabbed his wallet, and split. He died. A simple saline solution would have saved his life, but the hookers didn't want to call the ambulance in case they got arrested. He was fucked-up white trash, but he was a nice guy.

I think I have covered the cast of my little story. I also think that is the end of Chapter Three, especially since the Boy has gotten home with our new Playstation. Chapter Four is likely to come later on tonight, so don't get all bent out of shape (Migrainegirl).

Heh. I bet you all thought I was gonna get around to actual events in this chapter. Events are for the weak.

onehanded