Jerzy said (the internet said) that sometimes praying mantises were called devil’s horses. They were cannibals & meateaters holy shit YES fucking insect carnivores! It was like some shit out of Starship Troopers, which happened to be one of his alltime faves, some Starship Trooper shit come to life! But more than that, it was biblical, it was germane, it was more of the 4 Horseman shit that Suge told him at Cedars, the same shit he tried to run down to MoMA: White was Victory/Mantis, Black was famine/Hummingbird, Red was hummingblood… Mind you, the devil’s horsemen were not scavengers, nope, huh-uh, they weren’t like jackals either (hell-O! Can I tell you why they aren’t like jackals, Rikki? They aren’t like jackals cause they’re fucking INSECTS! Hel-lo) because they don’t eat dead things, that just aint kosher. . though under certain laboratory conditions, when, say, a rat cadaver was manipulated by some bored entomologist to simulate movement, the mantis could be tricked into pigging out. The Reanimators! Yech. Mantises could hide in plain sight by undulating like leaves in the wind. Double yech. Whoa creepy. Jerzy told him he read on the internet that mantises could kill fucking field mice & tree frogs & soft-shelled turtles—triple ugh! They seemed to be OCD sticklers too: when random offal detachSPLAT’d to the ground during an hellacious arthropodal chow, the morsel stayed on the ground like when a society lady drops a fork, you know suddenly it’s untouchable.
Hey Rikki do you feel me? Rikki? can you feel me?
Jerzy said the internet said Arabs thought mantises always prayed toward Mecca. The internet said Americans used to think or maybe still do that a mantis could blind a sleeping man & murder a baby in its crib. (SID = Sudden Insect Death) The internet said the French believed a praying mantis can point the direction home for a child who was lost. Well some of the French maybe. . . . …
Rikki said “Hey dude, enough, I don’t want this shit in my head.”
Jerzy said “I didn’t put shit in your head, bro, you put it in mine. You & Fishburne, right? I’m just reminding you of shit you already know. And you’re going to need to know it, bro. So you better be listening.”
Rikki said (with a smile at least) “Dude you are seriously fucked up. You oughta lay that PCP pipe down for a little. Whatever it is you’re doin. Cause that shit is fuckin you up.”
“If I lay it down you be pickin it up for sure.”
. .
Nighttime. Rikki did a bootie bump right there in the truck while Jerzy was off stalking the wild honeyshot! — Madonna & her daughter, at La Dolce Vita. J’d been after Lourdes’ hirsute honeydew for a few months now, stalking the elusive Little Madge vadge, a rare vintage indeed for Harry’s privates reserve. H ’round the M was in Jerzy’s front pocket now, seeing that Jerzy was the 1st & only snatcherazzo Harry deigned reach out to, the only one he thought would understand, & not judge. Jerzy had been pleased to introdouche himself.
Before Jerzy jumped out, he handed his young cohort a syringe of YES sans the spike. The boy really took to the meth/roxie combo where have I been all your life. He was smoking crystal now too, he’d do it in Tom-Tom’s room, he didn’t want ReeRee to see-see, Tom-Tom would laugh her spooky laugh not her goodtime girl laugh, T2 seemed to mind Rikki the least when he did dope in front of her. Some kind of control trip.
Rikki bootie-bumped at the house but never in a car. A car! Dude! Get over yourself… hiked his pants down under dark Bev Hills residential moon trees a hundred yards north of Sta Monica blvd. & shazam the deed was done. When Jerzy returned, Rikki was in some kind of reverie, & startled. His pants were still down, right above the knees, he had an oblivious deathclutch on the base of his rockhard dick, holding it there like a bouquet at Queer Prom. Jerzy cackled. Get a room, bro. Pretty good size camel on him tho, lotsa explainin to do down there… très deboner oops I mean debonair. What Rikki did next took Jerzy by surprise: he stroked it a few times & came, gluegunning the glove compartment. Rikki never did that in front of a man before but knew it was just business, the business of meth, when he got home there was some crap in his pants too, decent amount, what shocked Jerzy was that the kid had managed to spackle at all because sometimes he jacked 10 hrs straight w/o liftoff.
Kids today.
. .
He invited Rikki to see his work.
Jerzy stayed in the poolhouse which actually was the coolest place to live but no one wanted to because a generator as big as an outhouse sat buttnext to it. The thing was connected to two frigidaire freezers Betty White bought in the 1800s and kept out in the garage. The old generator had a full personality; it’d been around long enough to have earned run of the house (at least of the poolhouse & areas adjacent), meaning it belched revved rebooted and refarted whenever it damn pleased.
Rikki was anxious to see his new BFF’s art. Jerzy kept his various stashes in the poolhouse/garage & Rikki was anxious to see those too. Jerzy was now the official hostess w/the mostess.
The middleschool dropout, out-of-work actor & dad-to-be stepped back to take it all in while Jerzy rooted around for a pipe. Rikki was confused. He thought the photos would be shots of celebrities but couldn’t tell what they were. Jerzy kept mum, he was otherwise engaged. Rikki’s head was elsewhere too, he was thinking of his BFF’s stash but knew he really needed to try & focus solely on the so-called artwork because the more sincere & attentive he was to the pictures on the wall, the sooner & larger the bowl of crystal awaited him as a reward to ignite his bones… so he made sure to stay respectfully on it, even tho each millisecond was a war waged against ripping his eyes away from the weird, perfectly hung images & swiveling around to google if Jerzy was still treasurehunting the pipe or if he’d found it & already moved on to tapping no-longer-a-Secret Stash #1. Rikki decided to pose a question, which would at least afford him a quick glance, all like very fake casual, doop-de-doop-de-doo, like why would he have any interest in whatever the fuck Jerzy was up to, you know, like, how Rikki really wanted to spend the next 4 days was writing up a little critique about Jerzy’s fucked-up art project, the very last thing on his mind being to smoke a few bowls & get to the porn.